Abstract
The present study investigated whether emotional conflict and emotional conflict adaptation could be triggered by unconscious emotional information as assessed in a backward-masked affective priming task. Participants were instructed to identify the valence of a face (e.g., happy or sad) preceded by a masked happy or sad face. The results of two experiments revealed the emotional conflict effect but no emotional conflict adaptation effect. This demonstrates that emotional conflict can be triggered by unconsciously presented emotional information, but participants may not adjust their subsequent performance trial-by trial to reduce this conflict.
Highlights
Every day we are confronted by a plethora of information, some of which may be conflicting
The d9 score (M = 1.07, SD = 0.55) was significantly larger than zero, t(21) = 9.17, p,0.001, with relatively high hit rates (M = 70.32%, SD = 0.12) and false alarm rates (M = 31.91%, SD = 0.13). These results demonstrate that the participants were unable to recognize the valence of masked primes consciously in the strongly masked condition
Using a backward-masked affective priming paradigm, we demonstrated that unconscious emotional information could initiate emotional conflict as evidenced by longer reaction times (RTs) and higher error rates in the emotional incongruent condition relative to the emotional congruent condition
Summary
Every day we are confronted by a plethora of information, some of which may be conflicting. Cognitive conflict and the mechanisms of control have been examined extensively, and researchers have broadened this work to the affective domain [1] by using various paradigms, such as the emotional Flanker task [2], the emotional Stroop task [3,4], the Word-Face Stroop task [5,6,7] and the emotion AX-Continuous Performance Task [1,8]. Research has revealed that RTs on emotional incongruent trials are longer when preceded by an emotional congruent trial than when preceded by an emotional incongruent trial; likewise RTs on emotional congruent trials are shorter when preceded by an emotional congruent trial than when preceded by an emotional incongruent trial [e.g., 7,9] This effect is similar to the conflict adaptation effect in the cognitive control literature. These findings suggest that participants tend to adjust their subsequent performance to reduce conflict after they have experienced emotional conflict
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