Citation

Liu D, Wang L, Wang Y, Jiang Y. Psychol. Sci. 2016; 27(11): 1419-1427.

Affiliation

State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797616660680

PMID

27634003

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that emotional information processing can be modulated by what is being held in working memory (WM). Here, we showed that such content-based WM effects can occur even when the emotional information is suppressed from conscious awareness. Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm in conjunction with continuous flash suppression, we found that suppressed threatening (fearful and angry) faces emerged from suppression faster when they matched the emotional valence of WM contents than when they did not. This effect cannot be explained by perceptual priming, as it disappeared when the faces were only passively viewed and not held in WM. Crucially, such an effect is highly specific to threatening faces but not to happy or neutral faces. Our findings together suggest that WM can modulate nonconscious emotion processing, which highlights the functional association between nonconsciously triggered emotional processes and conscious emotion representation.

© The Author(s) 2016.

Language: en