Emotion in Chinese Words Could Not Be Extracted in Continuous Flash Suppression.

Hongmei Yan,Han Tian,Kaiwen Cheng,Lianfang Jiang,Aolin Ding

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00309

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated the automatic vigilance effect for faces and pictures and have attributed it to the brain’s prioritized unconscious evaluation of early evolutionary stimuli that are critical to survival. Whether this effect exists for evolutionarily more recent stimuli, such as written words, has become the center of much debate. Apparently contradicting results have been reported in different languages, such as Hebrew, English, and Traditional Chinese (TC), with regard to the unconscious processing of emotional words in breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). Our current study used two experiments (with two-character words or single-character words) to verify whether the emotional valence or the length of Simplified Chinese (SC) words would modulate conscious access in b-CFS. We failed to replicate the findings reported in Yang and Yeh (2011) using TC, but found that complex high-level emotional information could not be extracted from interocularly suppressed words regardless of their length. Our findings comply with the distinction between subliminal and preconscious states in Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and support the current notion that preconsciousness or partial awareness may be indispensable for high-level cognitive tasks such as reading comprehension.

Highlights

Emotional information is important for human survival, and many researchers have investigated whether emotion processing in the human brain is automatic
To assess the replicability of the findings reported in the abovementioned work by Yang and Yeh (2011) and to determine the influence of the distance between stimuli and the fovea on unconscious emotional processing, we will investigate whether negative words written in Simplified Chinese (SC) break continuous flash suppression faster than neutral words, suggesting an automatic vigilance effect, using two experiments
In this experiment, the inversion effect persisted for single-character words in the dichoptic session but disappeared in the binocular control session, confirming that word form but not emotional information could be processed in the absence of conscious awareness

Summary

Introduction

Emotional information is important for human survival, and many researchers have investigated whether emotion processing in the human brain is automatic. The quicker detection of masked negative faces and fear-relevant natural categories such as snakes or spiders has been interpreted as the automatic vigilance effect, in which negative information draws attention automatically and is evaluated more rapidly than neutral or positive information (Estes and Adelman, 2008). This effect might occur due to the existence of a fast subcortical pathway to visually process evolution-relevant stimuli (Whalen et al, 2004; Johnson, 2005; Almeida et al, 2008; Fang et al, 2016). Doubts have been raised regarding the use of these paradigms, in which participants may be partially aware of some low-level perceptual features, as these paradigms highly depend on short durations to present invisible stimuli successfully (Kouider and Dupoux, 2004; Kouider and Dehaene, 2007)

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