Abstract
Studies have shown that emotional pictures attract more attention than neutral pictures, and pictures of living stimuli have similar advantage in driving attention (vs. nonliving). However, factors of emotion, category and picture context are usually mixed so that whether living and nonliving categories elicit different skin conductance (SC) responses, in both conscious and unconscious conditions, remains to be clarified. In this study, participants were presented with negative and neutral pictures denoting different living and nonliving concepts in conscious (Experiments 1 and 2) and unconscious conditions (40ms, Experiment 3) when their SC responses were measured. The picture context was manipulated in Experiments 2 and 3 as half including human-related information. In three experiments, the emotional levels of different categories were matched in different and identical cohorts of participants. The results showed that living pictures in a negative, high-arousing dimension elicited stronger SC responses than nonliving pictures. When nonhuman animals and inanimate objects were compared, the increased SC responses to animals was obtained only for negative pictures without human contexts in the conscious condition, but regardless of human context in the unconscious condition. These results suggested that contextual information and level of conscious awareness are important to modulate the animate advantage in emotional processing.
Highlights
In our daily life, we experience fear to different kinds of things or situations
The interaction between emotion and category was marginally significant (F(4,116) = 2.33, p = .061, η2 = .08). This was because the living pictures were rated higher than nonliving pictures only for the negative–low pictures (p = .012) but not for the other types of pictures. These data confirmed the results of stimulus preparation and indicated that living and nonliving pictures evoked comparable arousal levels for the participants who were measured by the skin conductance (SC) response
Our study showed that when the valence and arousal levels were matched across categories, the animate advantage in the SC responses was prominent only for negative pictures, in both conscious and unconscious conditions
Summary
We experience fear to different kinds of things or situations. We are afraid when we see snakes, scenes of mutilation and earthquake, and war films. Phobias are more common with respect to some stimulus categories than others. An influential evolutionary-oriented theory regarding the role of stimulus category/content is the preparedness model [4,5]. This model proposes that stimuli that signal a threat to human ancestors during evolution influence attention and emotional processing. Fear is more readily learned and resistant to extinction for stimuli that are related to survival threats to our evolutionary ancestors (e.g., snakes or spiders) than to threats that have only recently emerged in our cultural history (e.g., guns or motorcycles) [5,6]
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