Attention To The Study Of Subliminal Processing Mechanism Of Emotional Unconscious

The relations between emotion and attention are a hot topic in the psychology research. Previous studies showed that lots of the emotional stimuli were processed non-conscious. The processing is mainly related to the activation of the superior colliculus, pulvinar and amygdala. However, these studies hold that non-conscious emotion processing was automatic, and never considered the role of attention. Indeed, attention often played an important role in the non-conscious emotion processing. For the attention system is not a single system, it’s composed of three systems with different neural mechanisms and functions, such as the alerting system, the orienting system and the executive control system. In this study, we combined the subliminal emotion processing and the attention system, to investigate the attention mechanism of subliminal emotion processing is related to the alerting system.Method:We used subliminal emotional faces as emotional stimuli, and used the E-ANT paradigm to investigate the attention mechanism of subliminal emotion processing.Results:For the altering system, there is significant difference between fearful faces and neutral faces. Fearful faces versus neutral faces were related to decreased alerting efficiency. The effect was resulted from the decreased reaction time of the no-cue trials, while the double-cue trials revealed no difference. For the orienting system and executive control system, there was no significant difference between fearful faces and neutral faces.Conclusion:The subliminal emotion processing of non-conscious is related to the alerting system. The decreased alerting efficiency of fearful face trials, mainly because that fear expressing decreased the RT of flanker task in no-cue trials, while had no significant effects on flanker task in the double-cue trials, suggests that emotional stimuli play a role of alerting cue.