Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The secret life of emotions.

Another demonstration that we can be nudged by unconscious emotional stimuli - that both global and specific emotional responses can be induced without awareness. From the discussion of an article with the title of this post from Ruys and Stapel, whose results show:
...that specific emotions can be elicited without conscious awareness of their cause...disgusting pictures (presented for 120 msec, not perceived) increased cognitive accessibility of disgust words and feelings of disgust. Similarly, fearful pictures increased cognitive accessibility of fear words and feelings of fear. When exposure to the priming stimuli was super-quick (40 msec), global mood, rather than a specific emotion, was evoked. These findings... empirically demonstrate (a) that specific emotions can be evoked without conscious awareness of their cause, (b) that unconscious exposure to emotion-eliciting pictures can evoke the specific corresponding emotion and does not evoke other emotions of similar valence, and (c) that unconscious emotion induction develops from elicitation of global affect to elicitation of specific emotions.

No comments:

Post a Comment