title: Conscious Access to Suppressed Threatening Information Is Modulated by Working Memory.
abstract: Previous research has demonstrated that emotional information processing can be modulated by what is being held in working memory (WM). Here, we showed that such content-based WM effects can occur even when the emotional information is suppressed from conscious awareness. Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm in conjunction with continuous flash suppression, we found that suppressed threatening (fearful and angry) faces emerged from suppression faster when they matched the emotional valence of WM contents than when they did not. This effect cannot be explained by perceptual priming, as it disappeared when the faces were only passively viewed and not held in WM. Crucially, such an effect is highly specific to threatening faces but not to happy or neutral faces. Our findings together suggest that WM can modulate nonconscious emotion processing, which highlights the functional association between nonconsciously triggered emotional processes and conscious emotion representation.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.|CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai, China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
authors.forename: Dong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences wangli@psych.ac.cn.|CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.|CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.|CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai, China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger / Q000502:physiology; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: continuous flash suppression; emotion; nonconscious; working memory