Dataset Information

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2.

ABSTRACT: It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emotional processing. To clarify this point, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) and event-related potential (ERP) techniques to distinguish between semantic and emotional processing. In CFS, we successively flashed some Mondrian-style images into one participant's eye steadily, which suppressed the images projected to the other eye. Negative, neutral, and scrambled words were presented to 16 healthy participants for 500 ms. Whenever the participants saw the stimuli-in both visible and invisible conditions-they pressed specific keyboard buttons. Behavioral data revealed that there was no difference in reaction time to negative words and to neutral words in the invisible condition, although negative words were processed faster than neutral words in the visible condition. The ERP results showed that negative words elicited a larger P2 amplitude in the invisible condition than in the visible condition. The P2 component was enhanced for the neutral words compared with the scrambled words in the visible condition; however, the scrambled words elicited larger P2 amplitudes than the neutral words in the invisible condition. These results suggest that the emotional processing of words is more sensitive than semantic processing in the conscious condition. Semantic processing was found to be attenuated in the absence of awareness. Our findings indicate that P2 plays an important role in the unconscious processing of emotional words, which highlights the fact that emotional processing may be automatic and prioritized compared with semantic processing in the absence of awareness.

SUBMITTER: Lei Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5397533 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2.

Lei Yi Y Dou Haoran H Liu Qingming Q Zhang Wenhai W Zhang Zhonglu Z Li Hong H

Frontiers in psychology 20170420

It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emotional processing. To clarify this point, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) and event-related p ...[more]

PMID: 28473785

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Project description:Semantic processing of visually presented words can be identified both on behavioral and neurophysiological evidence. One of the major discoveries of the last decades is the demonstration that these signatures of semantic processing, initially observed for consciously perceived words, can also be detected for masked words inaccessible to conscious reports. In this context, the distinction between conscious and unconscious verbal semantic processing constitutes a challenging scientific issue. A prominent view considered that while conscious representations are subject to executive control, unconscious ones would operate automatically in a modular way, independent from control and top-down influences. Recent findings challenged this view by revealing that endogenous attention and task-setting can have a strong influence on unconscious processing. However, one of the major arguments supporting the automaticity of unconscious semantic processing still stands, stemming from a seminal observation reported by Marcel in 1980 about polysemous words. In the present study we reexamined this evidence. We present a combination of behavioral and event-related-potentials (ERPs) results that refute this view by showing that the current conscious semantic context has a major and similar influence on the semantic processing of both visible and masked polysemous words. In a classical lexical decision task, a polysemous word was preceded by a word which defined the current semantic context. Crucially, this context was associated with only one of the two meanings of the polysemous word, and was followed by a word/pseudo-word target. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of semantic priming of target words by masked polysemous words was strongly dependent on the conscious context. Moreover, we describe a new type of influence related to the response-code used to answer for target words in the lexical decision task: unconscious semantic priming constrained by the conscious context was present both in behavior and ERPs exclusively when right-handed subjects were instructed to respond to words with their right hand. The strong and respective influences of conscious context and response-code on semantic processing of masked polysemous words demonstrate that unconscious verbal semantic representations are not automatic.

Dataset Information

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2.

Publications

Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2.

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