To follow up on yesterday’s post about all the processing that goes on in the brain outside of conscious awareness, here’s a story from EurekAlert about the role of the unconscious in reading facial expressions. In a recent study, people were given the merest glimpse of a happy or fearful face, a 30-millisecond look too brief to be consciously perceived. Then they were shown a surprised face and asked to rate whether the expression was a reaction to a pleasant or an unpleasant surprise. Their interpretation of the surprised faces was colored by whether they’d been “primed” with a happy or a scared face. A brief exposure to a fearful face made the surprise seem more negative, whereas a brief exposure to a happy face made the surprise seem positive. Brain activity as measured by EEG also changed in response to the fearful or happy faces, even though the people in the experiment didn’t consciously register them. The fearful faces kicked off the strongest reaction in those prone to social anxiety.
So maybe sometimes when you get a creepy feeling about something, for example, there’s a good reason for it, but it’s not a reason that you’re consciously aware of. Your subconscious is picking up on useful information and processing it without telling you about the process, just the end result.
