Emotional processing without conscious awareness plays an important role in human social interaction. Several behavioral studies reported that subliminal presentation of photographs of emotional facial expressions induces unconscious emotional processing. However, it was difficult to elicit strong and robust effects using this method. We hypothesized that dynamic presentations of facial expressions would enhance subliminal emotional effects and tested this hypothesis with two experiments. Fearful or happy facial expressions were presented dynamically or statically in either the left or the right visual (...) field for 20 (Experiment 1) and 30 (Experiment 2) ms. Nonsense target ideographs were then presented, and participants reported their preference for them. The results consistently showed that dynamic presentations of emotional facial expressions induced more evident emotional biases toward subsequent targets than did static ones. These results indicate that dynamic presentations of emotional facial expressions induce more evident unconscious emotional processing. (shrink)

There is an increasing interest in the relationship between imagery and emotion . The present research examined whether unconscious emotions affect visual imagery. In particular, participants were invited to perform a mental rotation test following subliminal presentation of happy, sad and neutral expressions. This study revealed an increase in mental rotation abilities after unconscious visual processing of emotional expressions. Altogether, these findings support the hypothesis of a bidirectional relationship between imagery and emotions.

Emotion modulates our time perception. So far, the relationship between emotion and time perception has been examined with visible emotional stimuli. The present study investigated whether invisible emotional stimuli affected time perception. Using continuous flash suppression, which is a kind of dynamic interocular masking, supra-threshold emotional pictures were masked or unmasked depending on whether the retinal position of continuous flashes on one eye was consistent with that of the pictures on the other eye. Observers were asked to reproduce the perceived (...) duration of a frame stimulus that was concurrently presented with a masked or unmasked emotional picture. As a result, negative emotional stimuli elongated the perceived duration of the frame stimulus in comparison with positive and neutral emotional stimuli, regardless of the visibility of emotional pictures. These results suggest that negative emotion unconsciously accelerates an internal clock, altering time perception. (shrink)

This research examined whether the non-conscious activation of an implicit appraisal concept could affect responses associated with the corresponding emotion as predicted by appraisal theories. Explicit and implicit emotional responses were examined. We focused on implicit unfairness and its effect on anger. The results show that subliminal activation of implicit unfairness affected implicit anger responses but not explicit anger feelings . The non-conscious effect of implicit unfairness was specific to anger, as no effect on sadness, fear, and guilt was found.