Unconscious Processing of Facial Emotional Valence Relation: Behavioral Evidence of Integration between Subliminally Perceived Stimuli

Abstract

Although a few studies have investigated the integration between some types of unconscious stimuli, no research has yet explored the integration between unconscious emotional stimuli. This study was designed to provide behavioral evidence for the integration between unconsciously perceived emotional faces (same or different valence relation) using a modified priming paradigm. In two experiments, participants were asked to decide whether two faces in the target, which followed two subliminally presented faces of same or different emotional expressions, were of the same or different emotional valence. The interstimulus interval (ISI) between the prime and the target was manipulated (0, 53, 163 ms). In Experiment 1, prime visibility was assessed post-experiment. In Experiment 2, it was assessed on each trial. Interestingly, in both experiments, unconsciously processed valence relation of the two faces in the prime generated a negative priming effect in the response to the supraliminally presented target, independent of the length of ISI. Further analyses suggested that the negative priming was probably caused by a motor response incongruent relation between the subliminally perceived prime and the supraliminally perceived target. The visual feature incongruent relation across the prime and target was not found to play a role in the negative priming. Because the negative priming was found at short ISI, an attention mechanism as well as a motor inhibition mechanism were proposed in the generation of the negative priming effect. Overall, this study indicated that the subliminal valence relation was processed, and that integration between different unconsciously perceived stimuli could occur.

Unconscious integration of sequentially presented subliminal arrow pointing directions

“…These results are consistent with, and supportive of the notion of unconscious processing of information as demonstrated by numerous researchers (Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, ; Diaz & McCarthy, ; Montoro et al, ; Yun et al, ). Furthermore, in the context of unconscious integration between different subliminal stimuli (e.g., two shapes, two words, two emotional faces, and even multisensory stimuli) in recent studies (Celeghin et al, ; Faivre et al, ; Lin & Murray, ; Liu et al, ; Montoro et al, ; Mudrik et al, ; Tu et al, ; van Gaal et al, ), Wang et al () found that two masked subliminal arrows elicited a PCE of motor‐response priming under a short interval and a NCE of motor‐response priming under a relatively longer interval between the prime and the target. These results suggest that people can process unconsciously perceived pointing direction relation of two arrows, which is corroborated in the present study.…”

“…Similar to experimental conditions in some previous priming studies of unconscious integration (Liu et al, ; Wang et al, ), in order to assess the visual and motor priming effects, SS and OO were divided into two subtypes. To indicate the two subtypes, two lowercase letters were added to the right of the two capitalised letters (see Table ).…”

“…Unconscious integration of information is a process that generates a new representation from two or more unconscious component representations, such as judging for similarity, combining multiple features, and so on (Mudrik, Faivre, & Koch, ). Up to now, there has been evidence that unconscious integration occurs between two subliminally presented arrows (Wang et al, ), between two shapes (Lin & Murray, ), between two words (van Gaal et al, ), between two emotional faces (Liu et al, ; Tu et al, ), between objects and their background scenes (Mudrik, Breska, Lamy, & Deouell, ), between multisensory stimuli (Faivre et al, ), and even between several stimuli to form gestalt‐like configurations (Celeghin, Savazzi, Barabas, Bendini, & Marzi, ; Montoro, Luna, & Ortells, ). However, the spatiotemporal range over which multiple pieces of information can be integrated has not been systematically studied.…”

“…In this area of research, most researchers adopted the method of simultaneous presentation of two or more subliminal stimuli. For example, the relation between the simultaneously presented subliminal prime stimuli (e.g., same or different categories, horizontal or vertical perceptual groupings) is found to influence the subsequent responses to a supraliminally presented target (Liu et al, ; Montoro et al, ; Van Opstal, Calderon, Gevers, & Verguts, ; Van Opstal, Gevers, Osman, & Verguts, ; Wang et al, ). These results supported the idea of an unconscious integration of information in a short‐range temporal domain (a simultaneous presentation of two prime stimuli can be considered the ultimately shortest temporal separation) (Mudrik et al, ).…”

“…In the priming effect analysis, we distinguished the prime‐to‐target motor‐response priming effect from the visual feature priming effect (Atas, Vermeiren, & Cleeremans, ; Liu et al, ; Naccache, Blandin, & Dehaene, ; Wang et al, ). The details of the two priming effects are presented in the results section.…”