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 heal

SUBMITTER: Lei Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5397533 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature