The emotional valence of subliminal priming effects perception of facial expressions
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2016
Authors
Huang, Melissa A.
Rana, Kunjan D.
Vaina, Lucia M.
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
MA Huang, KD Rana, LM Vaina. 2016. "The emotional valence of subliminal priming effects perception of facial expressions." 46th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. San Diego, California,
Abstract
We investigated, in young healthy subjects, how the affective content of subliminally
presented priming images and their specific visual attributes impacted conscious
perception of facial expressions. The priming images were broadly categorised as
aggressive, pleasant, or neutral and further subcategorised by the presence of a face and
by the centricity (egocentric or allocentric vantage-point) of the image content. Subjects
responded to the emotion portrayed in a pixelated target-face by indicating via key-press
if the expression was angry or neutral. Priming images containing a face compared to
those not containing a face significantly impaired performance on neutral or angry targetface
evaluation. Recognition of angry target-face expressions was selectively impaired by
pleasant prime images which contained a face. For egocentric primes, recognition of
neutral target-face expressions was significantly better than of angry expressions. Our
results suggest that, first, the affective primacy hypothesis which predicts that affective
information can be accessed automatically, preceding conscious cognition, holds true in
subliminal priming only when the priming image contains a face. Second, egocentric
primes interfere with the perception of angry target-face expressions suggesting that this
vantage-point, directly relevant to the viewer, perhaps engages processes involved in
action preparation which may weaken the priority of affect processing.