Looking at the smile without seeing the face - unconscious emotion processing M Sekutowicz1, M Rothkirch1, P Sterzer2 |
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1Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany |
| Previous evidence suggests that emotional face expressions may be processed preferentially even in the absence of awareness. However, whether facial expressions can influence observers’ behavior in the objective absence of awareness has remained elusive. Here, we recorded participants’ eye movements during visual search for a face rendered invisible with continuous flash suppression, an interocular suppression technique that reliably suppresses visual stimuli from awareness for extended periods of time. Faces either had a neutral, fearful, or happy expression. In a concurrently performed manual forced-choice task, participants were unable to indicate the location of the face (one sample t-test: t(17)<1), which objectively demonstrates that they lacked awareness of the faces. In contrast, their eye movements were more frequently directed towards the face stimulus compared to a contralateral control region (t(17)=4.01, p=.001). Most critically, there was an effect of facial expression on dwell times (F(2,34)=11.93, p<.001). Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc comparisons showed that participants dwelled significantly longer on faces with happy compared to both neutral (t(17)=4.43, p=.001) and fearful expressions (t(17)=3.1, p=.02). Our results demonstrate that even in the objective absence of awareness emotional stimuli have a considerable direct impact on oculomotor behavior, an effect possibly mediated by subcortical brain circuits. |
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