title: Masked emotional priming: A double dissociation between direct and indirect effects reveals non-conscious processing of emotional information beyond valence.
abstract: We demonstrate non-conscious processing beyond valence by employing the masked emotional priming paradigm (Rohr, Degner, & Wentura, 2012) with a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) variation. Emotional faces were briefly presented and directly masked, followed by the target face, using a SOA of either 43ms or 143ms. Targets were categorized as happy, angry, fearful, or sad. With short SOA, we replicated the differentiated priming effect within the negative domain (i.e., angry differentiate from fearful/sad). A direct test of prime awareness indicated that primes could not be discriminated consciously in this condition. With long SOA, however, we did not observe the priming effect whereas the direct test indicated some degree of conscious processing. Thus, indirect effects dissociated from direct effects in our study, an indication for non-conscious processing. Thereby, the present study provides evidence for non-conscious processing of emotional information beyond a simple positive-negative differentiation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Germany. Electronic address: wentura@mx.uni-saarland.de.
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wentura
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Germany.
authors.forename: Michaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rohr
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology, Hamburg University, Germany.
authors.forename: Juliane
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Degner
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Affective priming; Automatic processing; Emotion perception; Facial expression; Non-conscious