title: Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations.
abstract: An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task. Faces with happy, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions were presented as masked primes for 33 ms (Study 1) or 14 ms (Studies 2 and 3) followed by emotional target faces (Studies 1 and 2) or emotional adjectives (Study 3). Participants' task was to categorise the target emotion. In all three studies, discrimination of targets was significantly affected by the emotional primes beyond a simple positive versus negative distinction. Results indicate that specific aspects of emotions might be automatically disentangled in addition to valence, even under conditions of subjective unawareness.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany. j.degner@uva.nl
authors.forename: Michaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rohr
authors.forename: Juliane
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Degner
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wentura
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001364:Awareness; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D060865:Repetition Priming; D013997:Time Factors; D014796:Visual Perception