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Abstract:
It is established that facial expressions of emotion can
automatically elicit subconscious affective reactions even when
presented at sub-optimal exposures. Recent evidence indicates that
emotionally-charged stimuli presented outside conscious awareness
can convey meaning and influence conscious impressions and
judgements (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993), and one previous study
suggests that masked facial expressions can influence conscious
decision making processes (Reisel & Blair, submitted). In this
study we investigate the influence of masked fearful, neutral and
happy emotional expressions, at 30 ms exposure, on healthy adult
subjects decision making behaviour during a computerised
card-playing task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that masked fearful
expressions act as aversive stimuli, causing subjects to make
significantly less decisions to turn cards from packs associated
with their display, than those associated with masked neutral
faces. Experiment 2 compared fearful and happy stimuli, and found
that masked happy expressions were not positively reinforcing
participants decisions during this task. These results indicate
that associations form between the card stimuli and participants
affective reactions to the subliminally presented emotional
stimuli, which can influence subsequent decision making behaviour,
particularly in response to negative (fearful) facial expressions.
This area of research has direct implications for theoretical
models which address the role of facial expressions of emotion in
social interaction and in the modulation of intentional behaviour,
as well as the spontaneous and automatic nature of their
effects.
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