Naoaki Kawakami

Perceiving a story outside of conscious awareness: When we infer narrative attributes from subliminal sequential stimuli.

Perceiving a story behind successive movements plays an important role in our lives. From a general perspective, such higher mental activity would seem to depend on conscious processes. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, we demonstrated that such story perception occurs without conscious awareness. In the experiments, participants were subliminally presented with sequential pictures that represented a story in which one geometrical figure was chased by the other figure, and in which one fictitious character defeated the other character in a tug-of-war. Although the participants could not report having seen the pictures, their automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) were shifted to line up with the story. The results suggest that story perception operates outside of conscious awareness. Implications for research on the unconscious were also briefly discussed.

The implicit influence of a negative mood on the subliminal mere exposure effect.

Despite numerous studies on the mere exposure effect, it is still not clear why it occurs. The present study examined whether a negative mood would enhance or inhibit the effects. Fifty-two participants (30 men, 22 women; M age = 20.5 yr.) were assigned to one of two mood-induction groups (negative and neutral), and were exposed to a photograph 20 times after the mood induction. Thereafter, a single-category Implicit Association Test was conducted to measure their implicit attitudes toward the photograph. There was a significant interaction, with exposed stimuli evaluated more favorably than unexposed stimuli in the neutral condition, but not in the negative condition. This result suggests that a negative mood inhibited the mere exposure effect, implying that people could use their emotional states as cues to evaluate ambiguous objects that they have been repeatedly exposed to.

When You Become a Superman: Subliminal Exposure to Death-Related Stimuli Enhances Men’s Physical Force

Research based on terror management theory (TMT) has consistently found that reminders to individuals about their mortality engender responses aimed at shoring up faith in their cultural belief system. Previous studies have focused on the critical role that the accessibility of death-related thought plays in these effects. Moreover, it has been shown that these effects occur even when death-related stimuli are presented without awareness, suggesting the unconscious effects of mortality salience. Because one pervasive cultural ideal for men is to be strong, we hypothesized that priming death-related stimuli would lead to increasing physical force for men, but not for women. Building on self-escape mechanisms from TMT, we propose that the mechanism that turns priming of death-related stimuli into physical exertion relies on the co-activation of the self with death-related concepts. To test this hypothesis, we subjected 123 participants to a priming task that enabled us to combine the subliminal priming of death-related words with briefly presented self-related words. Accordingly, three different conditions were created: a (control) condition in which only self-related stimuli were presented, a (priming) condition in which death-related words were subliminally primed but not directly paired with self-related stimuli, and a (priming-plus-self) condition in which death-related words were subliminally primed and immediately linked to self-related stimuli. We recorded handgrip force before and after the manipulations. Results showed that male participants in the priming-plus-self condition had a higher peak force output than the priming and control conditions, while this effect was absent among female participants. These results support the hypothesis that unconscious mortality salience, which is accompanied with self-related stimuli, increases physical force for men but not for women. The gender difference may reflect the cultural belief system, in which individuals are taught that men should be strong. Thus, the unconscious mortality salience produced by exposure to the death-related stimuli motivates need to conform to this internalized cultural standard.

How do implicit effects of subliminal mere exposure become explicit? Mediating effects of social interaction

Recent studies have shown that the mere exposure effect under subliminal conditions is more likely to occur for implicit attitudes than for explicit attitudes. We tested whether the implicit effects of subliminal mere exposure could spill over to the explicit level through social interaction. Preliminary experiment replicated the findings that the subliminal mere exposure effect occurs only for implicit attitudes, and not for explicit attitudes. Main experiment showed that this implicit effect could become explicit through discussion between two individuals who had been subliminally exposed to the same stimuli. However, this transformation of attitudes through social interaction did not occur when the two individuals were exposed to different stimuli. Implications were discussed in terms of justification through social interaction.

Tracking hand movements captures the response dynamics of the evaluative priming effect

ABSTRACT We tested the response dynamics of the evaluative priming effect (i.e. facilitation of target responses following evaluatively congruent compared with evaluatively incongruent primes) using a mouse tracking procedure that records hand movements during the execution of categorisation tasks. In Experiment 1, when participants performed the evaluative categorisation task but not the non-evaluative semantic categorisation task, their mouse trajectories for evaluatively incongruent trials curved more toward the opposite response than those for evaluatively congruent trials, indicating the emergence of evaluative priming effects based on response competition. In Experiment 2, implementing a task-switching procedure in which evaluative and non-evaluative categorisation tasks were intermixed, we obtained reliable evaluative priming effects in the non-evaluative semantic categorisation task as well as in the evaluative categorisation task when participants assigned attention to the evaluative stimulus dimension. Analyses of hand movements revealed that the evaluative priming effects in the evaluative categorisation task were reflected in the mouse trajectories, while evaluative priming effects in the non-evaluative categorisation tasks were reflected in initiation times (i.e. the time elapsed between target onset and first mouse movement). Based on these findings, we discuss the methodological benefits of the mouse tracking procedure and the underlying processes of evaluative priming effects.

Image or Real? Altering the Mental Imagery of Subliminal Stimuli Differentiates Explicit and Implicit Attitudes

Recent research has shown that implicit and explicit attitudes are uniquely sensitive to different types of information sources. We predicted that altering the mental imagery of subliminal stimuli, which are presented below conscious awareness, would lead to discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitudes. Using a subliminal mere exposure paradigm, participants were subliminally exposed 30 times to the figure of either a rabbit or a duck. Before exposure, however, we altered participants’ mental images verbally so that they were either consistent or inconsistent with the subliminal stimulus. As expected, we found evidence that implicit and explicit attitudes were dissociated when participants’ mental images were inconsistent with the subliminal stimuli: Implicit attitudes reflected the actually presented figure, whereas explicit attitudes reflected participants’ mental images. Thus, it seems that mental imagery influences the development of explicit attitudes, while real information influences the development of implicit attitudes.

Conscious and unconscious processes are sensitive to different types of information

We examined whether conscious and unconscious processes are differentially sensitive to different kinds of information. Using an evaluative conditioning procedure, participants were repeatedly presented with photographs of women with happy or angry expressions paired with the words “happy” or “angry.” Half of participants (the unconscious condition) observed the pairings only subliminally. The other half (the conscious condition) observed the pairings supraliminally. Subsequently, all participants rated the women in the photographs with expressionless faces. Results showed that when pairings were presented subliminally (unconscious), participants rated the women more in accordance with the emotional valence of their previous facial expressions. On the other hand, when pairings were presented supraliminally (conscious), participants rated the women more in accordance with the emotional valence of the paired words. This indicates that while conscious processes are more sensitive to language information, unc...