Unconscious affective and cognitive processing of faces

Three goals were pursued in this research. First, the experiments were designed to investigate whether information from human faces can be unconsciously perceived. Second, the question of whether only affect from faces can be unconsciously processed (i.e., the affect primacy hypothesis) or whether cognitive dimensions can also be unconsciously processed was addressed. Third, an assessment was made of possible underlying mechanisms responsible for the priming effects. Tests were performed to determine whether a response competition or spreading activation mechanism was responsible for the unconscious processing of faces.; These goals were accomplished utilizing a masked priming procedure with the recently developed response window and regression methods (Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996; Greenwald, Klinger, & Schuh, 1995). Participants were presented with primes and targets consisting of photographs of female and male faces depicting either positive or negative emotions. In two experiments participants judged whether the affect of target faces was positive or negative, and in two additional experiments, participants judged target gender.; Results provided considerable evidence to support the claim that pictures of human faces can be unconsciously processed. Masked priming faces that apparently could not be consciously perceived strongly influenced target judgments.; Secondly, the results are incompatible with the affect primacy hypothesis, which predicts that affect should be unconsciously processed but not necessarily other stimulus dimensions (Zajonc, 1980). These studies found that both the gender and affect of masked priming faces strongly influenced target judgments. Additionally, the size of the gender influence was just as strong as the size of the affect priming suggesting affect is not primary in perception.; Finally, results were obtained that support a response competition model of unconscious priming. Similar to recent word studies, priming effects were obtained only on the stimulus dimension that participants intended to process. No residual priming effects were observed for gender when participants judged target affect, nor for affect when participants judged target gender. These results cannot be explained on the basis of spreading activation. Instead, these results are consistent with the claim that subliminally presented faces may automatically trigger response tendencies that facilitate or interfere with target responding.