The authors explored three properties of basic, unconsciously triggered affective reactions: They can influence consequential behavior, they work without eliciting conscious feelings, and they interact with motivation. The authors investigated these properties by testing the influence of subliminally presented happy versus angry faces on pouring and consumption of beverage (Study 1), perception of beverage value (Study 2), and reports of conscious feelings (both studies). Consistent with incentive motivation theory, the impact of affective primes on beverage value and consumption was strongest for thirsty participants. Subliminal smiles caused thirsty participants to pour and consume more beverage (Study 1) and increased their willingness to pay and their wanting more beverage (Study 2). Subliminal frowns had the opposite effect. No feeling changes were observed, even in thirsty participants. The results suggest that basic affective reactions can be unconscious and interact with incentive motivation to influence assessment of value and behavior toward valenced objects.
Amodio, D. M., Harmon-Jones, E., & Devine, P. G. (2003). Individual differences in the activation and control of affective race bias as assessed by startle eyeblink responses and self-report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 738-753.
2.
Anderson, A. K., & Phelps, E. A. (2002). Is the human amygdala critical for the subjective experience of emotion? Evidence of intact dispositional affect in patients with lesions of the amygdala. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 709-720.
3.
Baldwin, M. W., Carrell, S. E., & Lopez, D. F. (1990). Priming relationship-schemas: My advisor and the pope are watching me from the back of my mind. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 435-454.
4.
Bargh, J. A. (1996). Automaticity in social psychology. In E. T. Higgins & A.W. Kruglanski (Ed.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 169-183). New York: Guilford.
5.
Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype priming on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.
6.
Berns, G. S., McClure, S. M., Pagnoni, G., & Montague, P. R. (2001). Predictability modulates human brain response to reward. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 2793-2798.
7.
Berridge, K. C. (1996). Food reward: Brain substrates of wanting and liking. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 20, 1-25.
8.
Berridge, K. C. (1999). Pleasure, pain, desire, and dread: Hidden coreprocesses of emotion. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener,& N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 525-557). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
9.
Berridge, K. C., & Winkielman, P. (2003). What is an unconscious emotion: The case for unconscious “liking.”Cognition and Emotion, 17, 181-211.
10.
Cabanac, M. (1971). Physiological role of pleasure. Science, 173, 1103-1107.
11.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Gardner, W. L. (1999). Emotion. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 191-214.
12.
Chartrand, T. L. (2002). Mystery moods and perplexing performance: Consequences of succeeding and failing at a nonconscious goal.Manuscript in revision.
13.
Chen, M., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). Consequences of automatic evaluation: Immediate behavioral predispositions to approach or avoid the stimulus. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 215-224.
14.
Clore, G. L. (1994). Why emotions are never unconscious. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions (pp. 285-290). New York: Oxford University Press.
15.
Clore, G. L., & Colcombe, S. (2003). The parallel worlds of affective concepts and feelings. In J. Musch&K.C. Klauer (Eds.), The psychology of evaluation: Affective processes in cognition and emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
16.
Critchley, H., Daly, E., Phillips, M., Brammer, M., Bullmore, E., Williams, S., et al. (2000). Explicit and implicit neural mechanisms for processing of social information from facial expressions: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Human Brain Mapping, 9, 93-105.
17.
Edwards, K. (1990). The interplay of affect and cognition in attitude formation and change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 202-216.
18.
Ekman, P. (1984). Expression and the nature of emotion. In K. Scherer & P. Ekman (Eds.), Approaches to emotion (pp. 319-343). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
19.
Ellsworth, P. C., & Scherer, K. R. (2003). Appraisal processes in emotion. In R.J. Davidson, H. Goldsmith, K.R. Scherer (Eds.), Handbook of the affective sciences (pp. 572-595). New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
20.
Frijda, N. H. (1999). Emotions and hedonic experience. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 190-210). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
21.
Harmon-Jones, E., & Sigelman, J. (2001). State anger and prefrontal brain activity: Evidence that insult-related relative left prefrontal activation is associated with experienced anger and aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 797-803.
22.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133-168). New York: Guilford.
23.
Hull, C. L. (1951). Essentials of behavior. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.
24.
Innes-Ker, A., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2002). Emotion concepts and emotional states in social judgment and categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 804-816.
25.
Kihlstrom, J. F., Mulvaney, S., Tobias, B. A., & Tobis, I. P. (2000). The emotional unconscious. In E. Eich, J. F. Kihlstrom, G. H. Bower, J. P. Forgas, & P. M. Niedenthal (Eds.), Cognition and emotion (pp. 30-86). New York: Oxford University Press.
26.
Knutson, B., Adams, C. M., Fong, G. W., & Hommer, D. (2001). Anticipation of increasing monetary reward selectively recruits nucleus accumbens. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 1-5.
27.
Laeng, B., Berridge, K. C., & Butter, C. M. (1993). Pleasantness of a sweet taste during hunger and satiety: Effects of gender and “sweet tooth.”Appetite, 3, 247-254.
28.
Lang, P. J. (1993). The three-system approach to emotion. In N. Birbaumer & A. Öhman (Eds.), The structure of emotion: Psycho-physiological, cognitive, and clinical aspects (pp. 18-30). Seattle, WA: Hogrefe & Huber.
29.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. New York:Simon&Schuster.
30.
Matsumoto, D., & Ekman, P. (1988). Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE) and Neutral Faces (JACNeuF).Report available from Intercultural and Emotion Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University.
31.
Monahan, J. L., Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (2000). Subliminal mere exposure: Specific, general and diffuse effects. Psychological Science, 11, 462-466.
32.
Morris, J. S., Öhman, A., & Dolan, R. J. (1999). A subcortical pathway to the right amygdala mediating “unseen” fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 1680-1685.
33.
Murphy, S. T. (2001). The nonconscious discrimination of emotion: Evidence for a theoretical distinction between affect and emotion. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 32, 9-15.
34.
Murphy, S. T., Monahan, J. L., & Zajonc, R. B. (1995). Additivity of nonconscious affect: Combined effects of priming and exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 589-602.
35.
Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 723-739.
36.
Neuberg, S. L. (1988). Behavioral implications of information presented outside conscious awareness: The effect of subliminal presentation of trait information on behavior in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Social Cognition, 6, 207-230.
37.
Neumann, R., Förster, J., & Strack, F. (2003). Motor compatibility: The bidirectional link between behavior and evaluation. In J. Musch & K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The psychology of evaluation: Affective processes in cognition and emotion (pp. 7-49). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
38.
Niedenthal, P. M. (1990). Implicit perception of affective information. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 505-527.
39.
Niedenthal, P. M., & Kitayama, S. (1994). The heart’s eye: Emotional influences in perception and attention. San Diego: Academic Press.
40.
Öhman, A., Flykt, A., & Lundqvist, D. (2000). Unconscious emotion: Evolutionary perspectives, psychophysiological data and neuro-psychological mechanisms. In R. Lane & R. Nadel (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of emotion (pp. 296-327). New York: Oxford University Press.
41.
Öhman, A., & Soares, J. J. F. (1994). “Unconscious anxiety”: Phobic responses to masked stimuli. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 103, 231-240.
42.
Robles, R., Smith, R., Carver, C. S., & Wellens, A. R. (1987). Influence of subliminal visual images on the experience of anxiety. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 13, 399-410.
43.
Rolls, E. T., Rolls, B. J., & Rowe, E. A. (1983). Sensory-specific and motivation-specific satiety for the sight and taste of food and water in man. Physiology and Behavior, 30, 185-192.
44.
Rotteveel, M., de Groot, P., Geutskens, A., & Phaf, R. H. (2001). Stronger suboptimal than optimal affective priming?Emotion, 1, 348-364.
45.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1996). Feelings and phenomenal experiences. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 433-465). New York: Guilford.
46.
Strahan, E. J., Spencer, S. J., & Zanna, M. P. (2003). Subliminal priming and persuasion: Striking while the iron is hot. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 556-568.
47.
Thayer, R. E. (1996). The origin of everyday moods: Managing energy, tension, and stress. New York: Oxford University Press.
48.
Toates, F. (1986). Motivational systems. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.
49.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 54, 1063-1070.
50.
Whalen, P. J. (1998). Fear, vigilance and ambiguity: Initial neuro-imaging studies of the human amygdala. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 177-188.
51.
Whalen, P., Rauch, S.L., Etcoff, N.L., McInerney, S.C., Lee, M.B., & Jenike, M. A. (1998). Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 411-418.
52.
Winkielman, P., & Berridge, K. C. (2003). Irrational wanting and sub-rational liking: How rudimentary motivational and affective processes shape preferences and choices. Political Psychology, 24, 657-680.
53.
Winkielman, P., & Berridge, K. C. (2004). Unconscious emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 120-123.
54.
Winkielman, P., Zajonc, R. B., & Schwarz, N. (1997). Subliminal affective priming resists attributional interventions. Cognition and Emotion, 11, 433-465.
55.
Wright, C.I., Fischer, H., Whalen, P.J., McInerney, S.C., Shin, L.M., & Rauch, S. L. (2001). Differential prefrontal cortex and amygdala habituation to repeatedly presented emotional stimuli. Neuroreport, 12, 379-383.
56.
Zajonc, R. B. (2000). Feeling and thinking: Closing the debate over the independence of affect. In J.P. Forgas (Ed.), Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition (pp. 31-58). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
