Nonconscious Level Research Articles

Exploring the ‘black box’ of anxiety: An ERP study of non-consciously triggered fear generalization

Individuals with anxiety disorders frequently display heightened fear responses, even in situations where there is no imminent danger. We hypothesize that these irrational fear responses are related to automatic processing of fear generalization. The initial automatic detection of stimuli often operates at a non-conscious level. However, whether fear generalization can occur when the cues are not perceived consciously remains unclear. The current study investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying fear conditioning and its non-conscious and conscious generalization using a backward masking paradigm, combined with analysis of event-related potentials from electroencephalographic recordings. Behaviorally, participants showed heightened shock expectancy in response to non-conscious perceived generalization stimuli compared to those perceived consciously. Nonetheless, participants could not consciously distinguish between danger and safe cues in non-conscious trials. Physiologically, danger cues evoked larger frontal N1 amplitudes than safety cues in non-conscious trials, suggesting enhanced attention vigilance towards danger cues in the early sensory processing stage. Meanwhile, when fear generalization was conscious, it was accompanied by a larger P2 amplitude, indicating attention orientation or stimulus evaluation. In addition, fear conditioning was associated with sustained discrimination on P2, P3, and LPP. These findings collectively suggest that non-conscious fear generalization occurs at the neural level, yet additional control conditions are required to confirm this phenomenon on the US expectancy. Thus, non-consciously fear generalization may represent a mechanism that could trigger automatic irrational fear, highlighting the need for further research to explore therapeutic targets in anxiety disorders.

Can essences mix? An essentialist theory of genetic hybrids in the human and animal domain

This paper reviews research on biological essentialist beliefs and what these entail for perceiving genetic hybrids. It is suggested that hybrid perception results from the characteristics of essentialist reasoning, according to which living beings are endowed with a specific identity as a member of a natural kind. The most important elements of attributing an essence onto an individual are its perceived causal power to determine group membership, being immutable, discrete with regard to an individual's membership in exactly one category, making members of a category appear homogeneous, and ensuring intergenerational stability. Mixing two essences as in genetic engineering strips the hybrid of an unambiguous identity in perception, and results in its devaluation. Such devaluation seems to occur on a non-conscious level and across cultures. The basic claims not only hold for animals but also apply to the human domain and to inter-ethnic procreation, primarily for respondents with conservative worldviews.

Aesthetic semantics: Affect rating of atomic visual web aesthetics for use in affective user experience design

Aesthetic principle not only concerns the perception of visual beauty, but most crucially, the cognitive-affective responses derived from experiencing such stimuli. Despite this knowledge, user experience (UX) designers often prioritise beauty over intended end-user affect. This reversed order of prioritisation contradicts the sequential UX design process, leading to unexpected end-user perceptions and responses. The challenge in shaping UX before user interface (UI) design is that there first must be prior knowledge of aesthetic affect. A study with 1,782 worldwide participants was conducted evaluating affective user-responses to 43 atomic aesthetics using 153,252 data points and presented as affect ratings (ARs). Results demonstrated high affective resonance amongst aesthetics evaluated, suggesting aesthetic AR may be a viable method of improving the UX design process by influencing user perceptions, responses and actions at a non-conscious level. This is the first of a series of studies in the direction of Aesthetic Semantics®.

How does the non-conscious become conscious?

In this My Word, Joseph LeDoux describes how his work as a graduate student got him interested in human consciousness. Although he has not studied this topic since 1970s, he never stopped thinking and writing about it during his four-decade career exploring how non-conscious processes involving the amygdala detect and respond to danger. Here, he tells us what is on his mind about consciousness these days.

Effects of Baby Schema and Mere Exposure on Explicit and Implicit Face Processing.

In an increasingly multicultural society, the way people perceive individuals from the same vs different ethnic groups greatly affects their own and societal well-being. Two psychological effects that influence these perceptions are the Mere-Exposure Effect (MRE), wherein familiarity with certain objects or persons suffices for people to develop a preference for them, and the Baby Schema (BS), a set of specific facial features that evokes caregiving behaviors and an affective orientation in adults. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether these two effects play a role in implicit physiological responses to babies vs. adults faces belonging to participants in-group vs. out-group. In study 1, the pupillary diameter of 62 Caucasian participants (M = 31; F = 31) who observed adult and infant faces of different ethnic groups (Caucasian, Chinese) was measured. In study 2, brain waves of 38 Caucasian participants (M = 19; F = 19), who observed the same set of faces, were recorded using EEG. In both studies, adults explicit preferences (i.e., attitudes) toward faces were assessed using questionnaires. In Study 1, females showed greater attention to infant than adult faces (BS effect) in both pupils, regardless of the ethnic group of the face. By contrast, males attended to infant more than adult faces for out-group faces only (BS effect). In Study 2, greater left posterior-parietal alpha activation toward out-group compared to in-group adult faces was found in males (MRE). Participants with a low BS effect toward in-group baby faces exhibited greater left posterior alpha activation to out-group than in-group baby faces (MRE). These findings reveal how different levels of sensitivity to in-group infants may moderate perceptions of both in-group and out-group baby faces. Questionnaire measures on attitudes showed that males and females preferred in-group to out-group adult faces (MRE). Participants in Study 2 also reported a greater preference for infants than adults faces (BS effect). These findings explicate the roles of gender and the Baby Schema effect in moderating implicit processing of in-group and out-group faces, despite their lack in moderating explicit reports. Contradictory findings at the implicit (physiological) and explicit (self-report) levels suggest that differential processing of faces may occur at a non-conscious level.

Consumer satisfaction attribute mapping in hospitality industry through ZMET

The paper focuses on understanding brand awareness of consumers from an embedded cognitive state. Consumer's decision making for a brand mainly results from both conscious and non-conscious experiences that a consumer is been exposed to. Consumers preserve these brand knowledge and awareness in a non-conscious level of their mind. Marketers depend upon use of multi-sensory metaphors to bring out that digged-in knowledge. The researcher introduces ZMET as a method to elicitate hidden understanding about a consumer's decision making process by stimulating various human senses and understanding about the attributes that ultimately contributes in consumer decision making. The research would throw light on a qualitative example considering a hospitality industry by identifying the hidden metaphors that contribute in understanding the consumer's satisfaction for experiencing a particular service. This paper concludes with implications mainly for marketers so that they could better identify the decision making factors for consumers in the hospitality industry.

Discussion about the myth of self-esteem (SE): Measurement of SE working at the nonconscious level and examination of its changes by education

Discussion about the myth of self-esteem (SE): Measurement of SE working at the nonconscious level and examination of its changes by education

Enhanced conscious processing and blindsight-like detection of fear-conditioned stimuli under continuous flash suppression.

Emotional information, and specifically fear-related stimuli, have been shown to be preferentially processed at a nonconscious level and gain privileged access to awareness. However, recent evidence has emerged suggesting these findings are explained by low-level visual features rather than emotional salience. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that emotional salience increases both blindsight (i.e., detection with reduced awareness) and awareness of visually suppressed stimuli. We used fear conditioning to manipulate the emotional significance of neutral expressions presented under Continuous Flash Suppression. Fifty-two healthy participants were presented with perithreshold neutral faces, previously paired with an electric shock (CS+) or not (CS-), and asked to localise the quadrant wherein faces were presented and rate their level of confidence in the response. Results showed fear conditioning strength (indexed by skin conductance response to CS+ versus CS-) was positively associated with both increased "blindsight" and awareness of conditioned stimuli. These findings suggest emotional significance alone, and not merely low-level visual differences, can enhance pre-conscious and conscious processing of visual stimuli.

Conscious and Non-Conscious Measures of Emotion: Do They Vary with Frequency of Pornography Use?

Increased pornography use has been a feature of contemporary human society, with technological advances allowing for high speed internet and relative ease of access via a multitude of wireless devices. Does increased pornography exposure alter general emotion processing? Research in the area of pornography use is heavily reliant on conscious self-report measures. However, increasing knowledge indicates that attitudes and emotions are extensively processed on a non-conscious level prior to conscious appraisal. Hence, this exploratory study aimed to investigate whether frequency of pornography use has an impact on non-conscious and/or conscious emotion processes. Participants (N = 52) who reported viewing various amounts of pornography were presented with emotion inducing images. Brain Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded and Startle Reflex Modulation (SRM) was applied to determine non-conscious emotion processes. Explicit valence and arousal ratings for each image presented were also taken to determine conscious emotion effects. Conscious explicit ratings revealed significant differences with respect to “Erotic” and “Pleasant” valence (pleasantness) ratings depending on pornography use. SRM showed effects approaching significance and ERPs showed changes in frontal and parietal regions of the brain in relation to “Unpleasant” and “Violent” emotion picture categories, which did not correlate with differences seen in the explicit ratings. Findings suggest that increased pornography use appears to have an influence on the brain’s non-conscious responses to emotion-inducing stimuli which was not shown by explicit self-report.

ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN RELATION TO THEIR SOCIAL POSITION IN THE CLASS

The study was based on a theoretical presumption that social climate and relationships in the class can be in specific ways connected with students’ achievement motivation. Previous research in the area of student motivation was mostly based on self-reports and was therefore focused on explicit motives, i.e. personal goals which the respondents strived for. Self-report measures of motivation, however, can be affected by biases and misperceptions of one’s own self. Our study approached achievement motivation at its implicit, i.e. non-conscious level. It was conducted with students in five classes of a secondary school, N = 138, 107 female and 31 male, with an average age of 17 years. The respondents were administered a sociometric questionnaire and the projective Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) in McClelland´s adaptation using Heckhausen´s content-analytical clue for the measurement of achievement motivation. The hypothesized relation between social position in class and achievement motivation was only partly supported. Affiliation was unrelated to achievement motivation, even when analyzed for both achievement motives separately. We found a slight negative relationship between influence in the class and achievement motivation, especially with the motive to achieve success. These results, partly diverging from theoretical presumptions, can be explained in terms of specific features of the sample as well as a general methodological disparity in previous research, especially a lack of differentiation between implicit and explicit motives in the interpretation of the findings. Key words: achievement motivation, social position, sociometry.

Increasing cognitive load reduces interference from masked appetitive and aversive but not neutral stimuli.

Interactions between cognition and emotion are important for survival, often occurring in the absence of awareness. These interactions have been proposed to involve competition between cognition and emotion for attentional resources. Emotional stimuli have been reported to impair performance on cognitive tasks of low, but not high, load if stimuli are consciously perceived. This study explored whether this load-dependent interference effect occurred in response to subliminal emotional stimuli. Masked emotional (appetitive and aversive), but not neutral, stimuli interfered with performance accuracy but not response time on a cognitive task (n-back) at low (1-back), but not high (2-back) load. These results show that a load-dependent interference effect applies to masked emotional stimuli and that the effect generalises across stimulus categories with high motivational value. This supports models of selective attention that propose that cognition and emotion compete for attentional resources. More specifically, interference from masked emotional stimuli at low load suggests that attention is biased towards salient stimuli, while dissipation of interference under high load involves top-down regulation of attention. Our data also indicate that top-down goal-directed regulation of attention occurs in the absence of awareness and does not require metacognitive monitoring or evaluation of bias over behaviour, i.e., some degree of self-regulation occurs at a non-conscious level.

A scare in the OR highlights value of systems engineering.

A scare in the OR highlights value of systems engineering.

Undecidability and opacity of metacognition in animals and humans.

Undecidability and opacity of metacognition in animals and humans.

Dissociation between Awareness and Spatial Coding: Evidence from Unilateral Neglect

Prevalent theories about consciousness propose a causal relation between lack of spatial coding and absence of conscious experience: The failure to code the position of an object is assumed to prevent this object from entering consciousness. This is consistent with influential theories of unilateral neglect following brain damage, according to which spatial coding of neglected stimuli is defective, and this would keep their processing at the nonconscious level. Contrary to this view, we report evidence showing that spatial coding and consciousness can dissociate. A patient with left neglect, who was not aware of contralesional stimuli, was able to process their color and position. However, in contrast to (ipsilesional) consciously perceived stimuli, color and position of neglected stimuli were processed separately. We propose that individual object features, including position, can be processed without attention and consciousness and that conscious perception of an object depends on the binding of its features into an integrated percept.

Properties of spatial attention in conscious and nonconscious visual information processing

A modified flanker task was used to assess the effects of spatial attention during conscious and nonconscious processing. In line with prior findings, we demonstrated that increasing spatial separation between flankers and probes diminished the differences between reaction times to the incongruent and congruent probe-flanker pairs. This trend occurred even when the identity of flankers was suppressed from awareness by a metacontrast mask, indicating (1) that spatial attention can be allocated to information processed at the nonconscious, in addition to the conscious, levels, (2) that effects of spatial attention at these two levels can be equivalent, and (3) that attention deployed at the nonconscious level of processing can be characterized by a spatial gradient that is nearly identical to that found at the conscious level of processing.

Role of task-directed attention in nonconscious and conscious response priming by form and color.

Prior research on visual priming suggests that during nonconscious processing attention can be directed to single stimulus dimensions such as form or color. In the current experiment, nonconscious priming was compared to conscious priming by employing masking techniques that render primes invisible (masked) or visible (unmasked) to the observers. Observers were asked to respond to the form, the color, or the combination of form and color of the mask-probe that followed either a masked or an unmasked prime. The prime varied in its form and color congruency relative to the mask-probe. The results indicate (1) that during nonconscious processing a task-irrelevant stimulus feature can be attentionally filtered out, (2) that during nonconscious processing only separated stimulus features can be attended, and (3) that during conscious processing the conjunction of stimulus features comprising an object can be attended. Furthermore, the results indicate that at the nonconscious level stimuli are processed at an individual-feature level, while at the conscious level the stimuli can additionally be processed at a whole-object level.

Metacognition

Research in the field of metacognition, a multifaceted phenomenon, is in the main fragmented without much theoretical integration of the findings related to its various facets. Moreover, metacognition is usually conceived of as an individual and conscious process that serves the regulation of cognition. However, there is growing evidence that metacognition also functions at a nonconscious level, is involved in the co-regulation of cognition in collaborative settings, and interacts with affect in the self-regulation of behavior. Based on these considerations, a multifaceted and multilevel model of metacognition is proposed that broadens Nelson and Naren’s conceptualization of metacognition. The implications for theory and measurement of metacognition as well as for interventions involving metacognition are explored.

Diversity in the determinants of food choice: A psychological perspective

Eating, drinking and food choices are among the most frequent human behaviours. Although seemingly simple, they are complex behaviours that are determined by many factors and their interactions. The complexity of the research field stresses the necessity to attack problems in an interdisciplinary way. Unfortunately, truly interdisciplinary approaches are still rare in both sensory and consumer research. Although the number of publications has grown rapidly, there is little methodological progress and much repetition of easy mono-disciplinary research. Furthermore, and perhaps worst of all, there is very little influx from the fascinating fundamental insights about human behaviour gained over the last two decennia in physiology and psychology. Thus, findings about intuitive reasoning and the clear demonstration of the unconscious nature of most of our decision making do not seem to have touched sensory and consumer research, although they probably play a more important role in food-related behaviour than anywhere else. Instead, people still strongly adhere to theories like the theory of reasoned action and planned behaviour that are based on the idea of rational and conscious decision making and have come under severe criticism on the basis of their low predictive validity, their weak methodology and their strong theoretical bias. Past behaviour, habit and hedonic appreciation are usually better predictors of actual food choice behaviour than psychological constructs like attitudes and intentions. New insights and especially the realisation that much decision making occurs at a non-conscious level, should lead to a rethinking of the methods used in sensory and consumer research. Situational analysis, observational methods and memory and expectation research have the advantage that they leave the interactive integration of the behaviour determinants with the subject, where it belongs, instead of dissecting and reconstructing it via isolated single factor research.

Perirhinal and hippocampal contributions to visual recognition memory can be distinguished from those of occipito‐temporal structures based on conscious awareness of prior occurrence

The ability of humans to distinguish consciously between new and previously encountered objects can be probed with visual recognition memory tasks that require explicit old-new discriminations. Medial temporal-lobe (MTL) lesions impair performance on such tasks. Within the MTL, both perirhinal cortex and the hippocampus have been implicated. Cognitive processes can also be affected by past object encounters in the absence of conscious recognition, as in repetition priming tasks. Past functional neuroimaging findings in healthy individuals suggest that even in tasks that require conscious recognition decisions for visual stimuli, posterior cortical structures in the ventral visual pathway distinguish between old and new objects at a nonconscious level. Conclusive evidence that differentiates the neural underpinnings of conscious from nonconscious processes in recognition memory, however, is still missing. In particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings for the MTL have been inconsistent towards this end. In the present fMRI study, we tested whether perirhinal and hippocampal contributions to recognition memory can be distinguished from those of occipito-temporal structures in the ventral visual pathway based on the participants' reported conscious awareness of prior occurrence. Images of objects with a large degree of feature overlap served as stimuli; they were selected to ensure an involvement of perirhinal cortex in the present recognition task, based on evidence from past lesion-based research. We found that both perirhinal cortex and occipito-temporal cortex showed a differential old-new response that reflected a repetition-related decrease in activity (i.e., new > old). Whereas in perirhinal cortex this decrease was observed with respect to whether subjects reported objects to be old or new, irrespective of the true item status, in occipito-temporal cortex it occurred in relation to whether objects were truly old or new, irrespective of the participants' conscious reports. Hippocampal responses differed in their exact pattern from those of perirhinal cortex, but were also related to the conscious recognition reports. These results indicate that both perirhinal and hippocampal contributions can be distinguished from those of occipito-temporal structures in the ventral visual pathway based on the participants' reported conscious awareness of prior occurrence.

How Women’s Nonconscious Association of Sex with Submission Relates to Their Subjective Sexual Arousability and Ability to Reach Orgasm

Common cultural stereotypes promote women’s submission to men, especially within intimate heterosexual relationships. Mirroring these stereotypes, women possess nonconscious associations between sex and submission (Sanchez, Kiefer & Ybarra, 2006). Moreover, women’s sex-submission associations predict greater reports of engagement in submissive sexual behavior (Sanchez et al., 2006). In the present research, we again found that women associate sex with submission at a nonconscious level. Study 1 showed that women’s nonconscious sex-submission associations predict reduced subjective arousability. Study 2 further demonstrated that these associations predict impaired ability to reach orgasm among women. These findings suggest that sex-submission associations may adversely affect women’s sexual functioning.