Subjective Conscious Experience Research Articles

Cortical depth profiles in primary visual cortex for illusory and imaginary experiences

Visual illusions and mental imagery are non-physical sensory experiences that involve cortical feedback processing in the primary visual cortex. Using laminar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in two studies, we investigate if information about these internal experiences is visible in the activation patterns of different layers of primary visual cortex (V1). We find that imagery content is decodable mainly from deep layers of V1, whereas seemingly ‘real’ illusory content is decodable mainly from superficial layers. Furthermore, illusory content shares information with perceptual content, whilst imagery content does not generalise to illusory or perceptual information. Together, our results suggest that illusions and imagery, which differ immensely in their subjective experiences, also involve partially distinct early visual microcircuits. However, overlapping microcircuit recruitment might emerge based on the nuanced nature of subjective conscious experience.

Journeying to the past: time travel and mental time travel, how far apart?

Spatial models dominated memory research throughout much of the twentieth century, but in recent decades, the concept of memory as a form of mental time travel (MTT) to the past has gained prominence. Initially introduced as a metaphor, the MTT perspective shifted the focus from internal memory processes to the subjective conscious experience of remembering. Despite its significant impact on empirical and theoretical memory research, there has been limited discussion regarding the meaning and adequacy of the MTT metaphor in accounting for memory. While in previous work I have addressed the general limitations of the MTT metaphor in explaining memory, the objective of this article is more focused and modest: to gain a better understanding of what constitutes MTT to the past. To achieve this objective, a detailed analysis of the characteristics of MTT to the past is presented through a comparison with time travel (TT) to the past. Although acknowledging that TT does not refer to an existing physical phenomenon, it is an older concept extensively discussed in the philosophical literature and provides commonly accepted grounds, particularly within orthodox theories of time, that can offer insights into the nature of MTT. Six specific characteristics serve as points of comparison: (1) a destination distinct from the present, (2) the distinction between subjective time and objective time, (3) the subjective experience of the time traveler, (4) their differentiation from the past self, (5) the existence of the past, and (6) its unchangeability. Through this research, a detailed exploration of the phenomenal and metaphysical aspects of MTT to the past is undertaken, shedding light on the distinct features that mental time travel to the past acquires when it occurs within the realm of the mind rather than as a physical phenomenon. By examining these characteristics, a deeper understanding of the nature of mental time travel is achieved, offering insights into how it operates in relation to memory and the past.

Body in Mind

In the last few decades, emotion became one of the central topics in many scientific disciplines. Neuroscientific research has developed many tools and approaches for studying emotions in humans and animals. In this regard, the work of Antonio Damasio has been important for uncovering physiological mechanisms of emotions and feelings and their role in homeostatic regulation. In some aspects, his theory has challenged our own everyday intuitions about what emotions are. The aim of this article is to show that Damasio’s account of affects has underlined the importance of the body in generating feelings and subjective conscious experience and that this view of the two-way communication between the body and brain can offer a fresh perspective on the mind-body problem.

Facilitation of imitative movement in patients with chronic hemiplegia triggered by illusory ownership

The sense of body ownership, the feeling that one’s body belongs to oneself, is a crucial subjective conscious experience of one’s body. Recent methodological advances regarding crossmodal illusions have provided novel insights into how multisensory interactions shape human perception and cognition, underpinning conscious experience, particularly alteration of body ownership. Moreover, in post-stroke rehabilitation, encouraging the use of the paretic limb in daily life is considered vital, as a settled sense of ownership and attentional engagement toward the paralyzed body part may promote increased frequency of its use and prevent learned nonuse. Therefore, in addition to traditional methods, novel interventions using neurorehabilitation techniques that induce self-body recognition are needed. This study investigated whether the illusory experience of a patient’s ownership alterations of their paretic hand facilitates the enhancement in the range of motion of succeeding imitation movements. An experiment combining a modified version of the rubber hand illusion with imitation training was conducted with chronic hemiplegia. A larger imitation movement of the paretic hand was observed in the illusion-induced condition, indicating that the feeling of ownership toward the observed limb promotes the induction of intrinsic potential for motor performance. This training, using subjective experience, may help develop new post-stroke rehabilitation interventions.

A Scientific Approach to Conscious Experience, Introspection, and Unconscious Processing: Vision and Blindsight.

Although subjective conscious experience and introspection have long been considered unscientific and banned from psychology, they are indispensable in scientific practice. These terms are used in scientific contexts today; however, their meaning remains vague, and earlier objections to the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing, remain valid. This also applies to the distinction between conscious visual perception and unconscious visual processing. Damage to the geniculo-striate pathway or the visual cortex results in a perimetrically blind visual hemifield contralateral to the damaged hemisphere. In some cases, cerebral blindness is not absolute. Patients may still be able to guess the presence, location, shape or direction of movement of a stimulus even though they report no conscious visual experience. This “unconscious” ability was termed “blindsight”. The present paper demonstrates how the term conscious visual experience can be introduced in a logically precise and methodologically correct way and becomes amenable to scientific examination. The distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing is demonstrated in the cases of conscious vision and blindsight. The literature on “blindsight” and its neurobiological basis is reviewed. It is shown that blindsight can be caused by residual functions of neural networks of the visual cortex that have survived cerebral damage, and may also be due to an extrastriate pathway via the midbrain to cortical areas such as areas V4 and MT/V5.

What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models.

The nature of consciousness is considered one of science’s most perplexing and persistent mysteries. We all know the subjective experience of consciousness, but where does it arise? What is its purpose? What are its full capacities? The assumption within today’s neuroscience is that all aspects of consciousness arise solely from interactions among neurons in the brain. However, the origin and mechanisms of qualia (i.e., subjective or phenomenological experience) are not understood. David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem” to describe the difficulties in elucidating the origins of subjectivity from the point of view of reductive materialism. We propose that the hard problem arises because one or more assumptions within a materialistic worldview are either wrong or incomplete. If consciousness entails more than the activity of neurons, then we can contemplate new ways of thinking about the hard problem. This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time. The mechanisms underlying these “non-local” properties are vaguely suggestive of quantum entanglement in physics, but how such effects might manifest remains highly speculative. The existence of these non-local effects appears to support the proposal that post-materialistic models of consciousness may be required to break the conceptual impasse presented by the hard problem of consciousness.

Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia by Jon Day

Reviewed by: Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia by Jon Day Josh Powell Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia. By Jon Day. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. ix+197 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–4744–5839–9. In 2013, taking a break from my Masters dissertation on sensory modernism, I proof-read another student's philosophy dissertation on the problems posed to physicalist views of the world by 'qualia' (individual instances of subjective conscious experience). In 2021, I married the author of that qualia dissertation and it is pleasing to review a work which weds (sorry) the topic of my dissertation with hers. Noting that 'as a philosophical entity the quale is broadly contemporaneous with the artefacts of high modernism' (p. 5), Jon Day's study does striking historicist work in reading philosophical discussions of qualia in relation to the literary movement most known for foregrounding individual instances of conscious experience. It is surprising that this kind of work has not been done before. I am certainly surprised, and a little disappointed, that it did not occur to me back in 2013. The problem to which Day's title refers is not the one that qualia potentially pose to physicalism. Instead, while trying to evade philosophical disputes about the existence of qualia, Day is primarily concerned with the problem that the notion of the quale poses to modernist fiction and its study. In particular, Day stresses the degree to which the discourse around qualia problematizes the 'cognitive realist' understanding of modernism—the understanding that, through literary innovation, modernist writers were able to describe 'not just the functions of consciousness but also its phenomenological properties' (p. 12). The crux here is that qualia, as conceptualized in philosophy, cannot be captured in language, whether [End Page 493] that language is scientific, mathematical, or literary. Thus, as Day memorably puts it: 'if qualia do exist, then Flaubert's "mouldy colour of a wood-louse's existence" simply cannot be conveyed within language, however refined or experimental or accomplished that language may be' (p. 6). Perhaps, then, defenders of cognitive realism would want to deny qualia. This creates its own problems: by denying qualia one risks 'denying some of the very properties of consciousness that the novel, as a form, has often been celebrated for accommodating' (p. 6). To accept qualia, then, is to accept that literary writing cannot capture the phenomenological properties of consciousness; to deny qualia is to bring into question the existence of the very thing that modernist writing is supposed to be singularly deft at getting across: individual instances of conscious experience. In advancing his thesis, Day offers a range of incisive readings of prominent modernist writers. The standout chapter is undoubtedly the one on Joyce (Chapter 3). From this, Ulysses emerges not as an attempt to portray 'what it is like to be another mind', but a 'radical interrogation' of cognitive realist thought (p. 76). Elsewhere the chapter on Wyndham Lewis (Chapter 6) does excellent work in detailing Lewis's concern with a qualia-denying, behaviourist view of human subjectivity. Not everything works. There is something of a double introduction, which means the book is slow to get to its primary literary texts. Chapter 4, which covers 'Neuromodernism and the Explanatory Gap', contains a lot of historical detail that probably would have been better put into notes. Chapter 5, frustratingly for this Beckettian reader, takes a long time to get to its titular author, and suffers from lack of engagement with recent work on Beckett and perceptual experience by writers such as Steven Connor, Laura Salisbury, and Ulrika Maude. These, though, are minor points. The study should ultimately prove a fascinating read for anyone interested in finding new ways of thinking about literary modernism's engagement with the senses. Josh Powell Cardiff University Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

An Exploratory Analysis of Collective Patterns of Conscious Experience Using a Self-Report Questionnaire.

This study is an exploration of collective patterns of conscious experience, as described by various psychological models, using a self-report questionnaire: The Consciousness Quotient Inventory (CQ-i). The CQ-i evaluates patterns of behaviors, attitudes, and attentional styles as well as the usage of conscious skills, awareness, and the capacity to “feel awake and alive,” providing a complex exploration of conscious experience. A set of 237 items covering major aspects of the subjective conscious experience was selected to detect the phenomenal patterns of subjective conscious experience. An exploratory factor analysis on a large sample (N = 2,360), combined with our previous meta-research on conceptual convergence of conscious experiences, revealed that these experiences appear to have 15 patterns common to all of us. A sample with a quasi-normal distribution (n = 2,266) was employed for standardization and classification of scores (M = 100; SD = 15). The study provides a conceptual framework for future in-depth studies on collective patterns of self-awareness, inner growth dynamics, and psychological maturity.

Creation, Evolution, and “The New Cosmic Philosophy”: William Todd Martin's Critique of Herbert Spencer

AbstractThis article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in 1887 publishedThe Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of “evolution” and “creation” by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.

Surprise: a micro-sociological analysis

This article explores the social and relational aspects of surprise: a reaction to the sudden discovery of unexpected knowledge. Drawing on the micro-sociological perspectives of phenomenology, dramaturgy and symbolic interactionism, I present a five-stage trajectory of this social emotion, charting its emergence, feeling, meaning, responses and function. Surprise emerges from situated encounters when an unexpected incident causes a break in the script. This evokes a subjective experience of flustering and dual consciousness, which separates the actor from their role. The signified meanings of surprise include shifts of biographical identity, changes in power and status, and concerns about the exposure of epistemological naivety. Actors perform expressive gestures of surprise in line with cultural feeling and display rules, using dramaturgical techniques of impression management; these include dramatic realisation and verbal response cries. Team-mates cooperatively enact reparative interaction rituals, such as apologies, token exchange and feigned non-reaction, which restore the normal appearance of a scene. Surprise therefore has the paradoxical quality of being disruptively cohesive. While its immediate expression marks a momentary disturbance, it ultimately functions to maintain interaction order.

Conversational analysis of consciousness during seizures

ObjectiveThe objectives of the study were to 1) investigate how patients with epilepsy describe the subjective, conscious experience of having a seizure and 2) determine whether certain themes and descriptions correspond to specific types of epilepsy. MethodsWe interviewed thirteen patients with electroencephalographically confirmed epilepsy about their subjective experience of having a seizure and used conversational analysis (CA) to analyze the language they used to describe this experience. ResultsSeven patients had focal to bilateral tonic–clonic seizures (FBTCS), 7 had focal impaired awareness seizures (FIAS), 1 had focal aware seizures (FAS), and one had generalized onset tonic–clonic (GTC) seizures. Three had multiple types of seizures. Focal seizure origin was frontal in 2 patients, right hemisphere in 1, parieto-occipital in 1, and temporal in 8. Focal to bilateral tonic–clonic and GTC seizures were most frequently associated with descriptions of a total loss of consciousness (n = 8), whereas FIAS were most frequently associated with a perceived loss of consciousness but able to describe some aspects of being unconscious (n = 5). Temporal seizures most frequently accompanied reports of memory loss/impairment (n = 4). Ten patients provided specific descriptions of the transition between the interictal and ictal state or auras. Descriptions consciousness and unconsciousness ranged significantly, resembling a continuum rather than corresponding to distinct levels. ConclusionThe subjective experience of consciousness for patients with epilepsy may differ by seizure type and origin. These may reflect different involvement of brain regions involved in producing consciousness and arousal. Conversational analysis and narrative approaches can significantly aid clinicians in the diagnosis and management of epilepsy.

Wireless ‘under the skull’ epidural EEG and behavior in piglets during nitrous oxide or carbon dioxide gas euthanasia

Consciousness is central to animal welfare concerns. Its assessment is most often conducted based on behavior, with a poor understanding of the correspondence between behavior and the neurobiological processes that underlie the subjective experience of consciousness. Recording of brain electrical activity using electrodes placed under the skull improves EEG recording by minimizing artifacts from muscular or cardiac activities, and it can now be combined with wireless recording in free-moving animals. This experiment investigated the correspondence between wireless ‘under the skull’ epidural EEG and the behavior of 18 five-week-old female piglets undergoing nitrous oxide (N2O) or carbon dioxide (CO2) gradual fill gas euthanasia at 25% replacement rate per minute of the chamber volume. Piglets exposed to CO2 had a peak in EEG total power (‘Ptot’) during the flailing stage, whereas piglets exposed to N2O had a higher EEG 95% spectral edge frequency (‘F95’) during their initial explorative behavior phase and a drop in EEG median frequency (‘F50’) after loss of posture. Loss of posture without righting attempt, as the last behavioral state observed during euthanasia, preceded the onset of transitional EEG on average by 0.9 and 3.1 min (for CO2 and N2O treatments, respectively), and the onset of isoelectric EEG by 4.5 and 6.2 min (for CO2 and N2O treatments, respectively). Paddling movements occurred shortly before and during transitional EEG but never during isoelectric EEG, whereas gasps persisted after the EEG had become isoelectric. The dynamics of EEG spectral changes were complex to interpret in relation to the degree of consciousness, but isoelectric EEG as an unequivocal indicator of unconsciousness appeared several minutes after loss of posture with no righting attempt. This leaves a window of uncertainty in regards to the potential for consciousness after loss of posture during gradual fill gas euthanasia in piglets.

Late Positivity Does Not Meet the Criteria to be Considered a Proper Neural Correlate of Perceptual Awareness.

Contrastive analysis has been widely employed in the search for the electrophysiological neural correlates of consciousness. However, despite its clear logic, it has been argued that it may not succeed in isolating neural processes solely involved in the emergence of perceptual awareness. In fact, data from contrastive analysis would be contaminated by potential confounding factors reflecting distinct, though related, processes either preceding or following the conscious perception. At present, the ERP components representing the proper correlates of perceptual awareness still remain to be identified among those correlating with awareness (i.e., Visual Awareness Negativity, VAN and Late Positivity, LP). In order to dissociate visual awareness from post-perceptual confounds specifically related to decision making, we manipulated the response criterion, which affects how a percept is translated into a decision. In particular, while performing an orientation discrimination task, participants were asked to shift their response criterion across sessions. As a consequence, the resulting modulation should concern the ERP component(s) not exclusively reflecting mechanisms regulating the subjective conscious experience itself but rather the processes accompanying it. Electrophysiological results showed that N1 and P3 were sensitive to the response criterion adopted by participants. Additionally, the more the participants shifted their response criterion, the bigger the ERP modulation was; this was consequently indicative of the critical role of these components in the decision-making processes regardless of awareness level. When considering data independently from the response criterion, the aware vs. unaware contrast showed that both VAN and LP were significant. Crucially, the LP component was also modulated by the interaction of awareness and response criterion, while VAN results to be unaffected. In agreement with previous literature, these findings provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that VAN tracks the emergence of visual awareness by encoding the conscious percept, whereas LP reflects the contribution from post-perceptual processes related to response requirements. This excludes a direct functional role of this later component in giving rise to perceptual awareness.

A general spectral decomposition of causal influences applied to integrated information

BackgroundQuantifying interactions among many neurons is fundamental to understanding system-level phenomena such as attention, learning and even conscious experience. Causal influences in the brain, quantified as integrated information, are thought to support subjective conscious experience. Recent empirical work has shown that the spectral decomposition of causal influences, for example using Granger causality, can reveal frequency-specific influences that are not observed in the time domain. However, a spectral decomposition of integrated information has not been put forward, limiting its adoption for analyzing neural data. New methodWe present a general and flexible framework for deriving the spectral decomposition of causal influences in autoregressive processes. ResultsWe use the framework to derive a spectral decomposition of integrated information. We show that other well-known measures, including Granger causality, can be derived using the same framework. Using simulations, we demonstrate a complex interplay between the spectral decomposition of integrated information and other measures that is not observed in the time domain. Comparison with existing methodsThis paper provides a spectral decomposition of integrated information for the first time. Although a spectral decomposition of Granger causality has been derived, that approach is only applicable to uni-directional causal influences, not multi-directional causal influences as required for integrated information. ConclusionsOur novel framework can be used to derive the spectral decomposition of uni- and multi-directional measures of causal influences. We use this framework to derive a spectral decomposition of integrated information, paving the way for better understanding how frequency-specific causal influences in the brain relate to cognition.

An Analysis of the Implications of Modernity on Humanity: Developing an Epistemological Framework

The paper seeks to explore the hidden assumptions that are imbedded in a modern, atheistic, naturalistic philosophical outlook, and the conclusions of which are often overlooked. Particularly, the authors highlight that a philosophically naturalistic outlook leads to untenable conclusions regarding human morality, volition, and subjective conscious experience. The analysis finds that a modern approach, if taken to its logical conclusion, would leave humanity bereft of meaning. The authors argue that the naturalistic approach requires leaps of faith regarding human cognitive capacities, as it assumes sound reasoning without justification to such a premise. The authors conclude that religious grounding, specifically an Islamic conceptual framework, is necessary to account for consciousness, logic, and morality, while the abandonment of this tradition along with the metaphysical foundation it provides leaves the modern man struggling to justify rationality, moral arguments, and even basic articulation with which he rejects faith in God. Thus, the authors conclude that modernity, while commended for its advancements in the sciences, must not lose the metaphysical underpinnings upon which it is founded.

Looking for effects of qualia on event-related brain potentials of close others in search for a cause of the similarity of qualia assumed across individuals

Qualia, the individual instances of subjective conscious experience, are private events. However, in everyday life, we assume qualia of others and their perceptual worlds, to be similar to ours. One way this similarity is possible is if qualia of others somehow contribute to the production of qualia by our own brainand vice versa. To test this hypothesis, we focused on the mean voltages of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the time-window of the P600 component, whose amplitude correlates positively with conscious awareness. These ERPs were elicited by images of the international affective picture system in 16 pairs of friends, siblings or couples going side by side through hyperscanning without having to interact. Each of the 32 members of these 16 pairs faced one half of the screen and could not see what the other member was presented with on the other half. One stimulus occurred on each half simultaneously. The sameness of these stimulus pairs was manipulated as well as the participants' belief in that sameness by telling subjects' pairs that they were going to be presented with the same stimuli in two blocks and with different ones in the two others. ERPs were more positive at all electrode subsets for stimulus pairs that were inconsistent with the belief than for those that were consistent. In the N400 time window, at frontal electrode sites, ERPs were again more positive for inconsistent than for consistent stimuli. As participants had no way to see the stimulus their partner was presented with and thus no way to detect inconsistence, these data might reveal an impact of the qualia of a person on the brain activity of another. Such impact could provide a research avenue when trying to explain the similarity of qualia across individuals.

Changes in the sense of agency during hypnosis: The Hungarian version of the Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS-HU) and its relationship with phenomenological aspects of consciousness.

Changes in the sense of agency are defining feature of hypnosis. The Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS) is a 10-item questionnaire, administered after a hypnosis session to assess alteration in the sense of agency. In the present study, a Hungarian version of the measure (SOARS-HU) is presented. The SOARS-HU and the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) were administered to 197 subjects following hypnotizability screening with the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A (HGSHS:A). Confirmatory factor analysis and correlations with hypnotizability demonstrate the reliability and validity of the SOARS-HU. Changes in the Involuntariness and Effortlessness subscales of the SOARS-HU were associated with alterations in subjective conscious experience, as measured by the PCI. These changes in subjective experience remained significant after controlling for HGSHS:A scores. These results indicate that changes in the sense of agency during hypnosis are associated with alterations of consciousness that are independent of hypnotizability.

Pain Perception Within Consciousness

As a psychological state, pain is perceived by the affected individual and it corresponds to a form of conscious awareness as a subjective conscious experience mediated in part by beliefs or emotions. Regardless of its 'physical' origins, pain, like all other perceptions, is a mental experience at different degrees of consciousness. The experience of pain requiring a stimulus, a feeling or emotion, and an effect or result, consists of an intermingling of chemical, biological, psychological, physiologic, socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic backgrounds, emotional, and cognitive factors. Not only the activation but also the connections are involved in conscious pain perception. Moreover, interconnectivity between the periaqueductal matter and orbitofrontal cortex is the key to cognitive-emotional responses associated with pain. Thus, the central pain control processes arising from interactions among the cognitive-evaluative, motivational-affective, and sensory-discriminative systems characterize the pain response, being also influenced by both noxious input and cognitive self-regulation. Neuroimaging studies (Davis et al., 2015) in healthy volunteers showed that pain cannot be localized in an isolated “pain center” in the brain, but it rather encompasses a neural circuitry.

Consciousness is Quantum Computed Beyond the Limits of the Brain: A Perspective Conceived from Cases Studied for Hydranencephaly

Hydranencephaly is a developmental malady, where the cerebral hemispheres of the brain are reduced partly or entirely too membranous sacs filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Infants with this malady are presumed to have reduced life expectancy with a survival of weeks to few years and which solely depends on care and fostering of these individuals. During their life span these individuals demonstrate behaviours that are termed “vegetative” by neuroscientists but can be comparable to the state of being “aware” or “conscious”. Based on the most simplified definition for consciousness i.e. “awareness” or “to be aware”, these individuals are undeniably aware of their existence and therefore should be termed “conscious”. The bigoted approach of neuroscience towards understanding consciousness is usually linked with the cortex of the brain and therefore a malady as hydranencephaly poses a great challenge to this field. This paper is a compilation of behaviours and aptitudes observed in several cases of hydranencephaly which suggests, that consciousness is not just a brain process, but is a highly quantum computed process that follows laws of quantum physics, giving rise to the subjective experience of consciousness in these individuals.

Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Gender Difference: An Empirical Study

Emotions differentiate human beings from animals. It is a subjective conscious experience characterized by psycho-physiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental status. The objective of the current study was to assess whether there existed any differences in emotional intelligence among post graduate students with respect to their gender. A standardized questionnaire was used to conduct the study and data was collected from 100 post graduate students using random sampling method. Emotional intelligence of the sample respondents was measured with the help of a scale developed by Hyde, Pethe, and Dhar (2002) consisting of 34 items. Data was analyzed using SPSS and the results indicated that the level of emotional intelligence among female students was higher than it was in male students.