ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Automatic Processing of Emotional Words in the Absence of Awareness: The Critical Role of P2.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Attention Bias to Pain Words Comes Early and Cognitive Load Matters: Evidence from an ERP Study on Experimental Pain.Neural plasticity · 2021Trial
- Differential role of beta band activity in a dual-task working memory paradigm under internally vs. externally directed cognition.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Unaware processing of words activates experience-derived information in conceptual-semantic brain networks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Self-referential Processing in Remitted Depression: An Event-Related Potential Study.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2023Article
- Cognitive and Affective Empathy Relate Differentially to Emotion Regulation.Affective science · 2022Article
- Religious Primes and Threat-Perceptions as Predictors of Attitudes toward Muslims in Israel.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2020Article
- Neural Correlates of Emotion Processing in Word Detection Task.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emotional processing. To clarify this point, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) and event-related potential (ERP) techniques to distinguish between semantic and emotional processing. In CFS, we successively flashed some Mondrian-style images into one participant's eye steadily, which suppressed the images projected to the other eye. Negative, neutral, and scrambled words were presented to 16 healthy participants for 500 ms. Whenever the participants saw the stimuli-in both visible and invisible conditions-they pressed specific keyboard buttons. Behavioral data revealed that there was no difference in reaction time to negative words and to neutral words in the invisible condition, although negative words were processed faster than neutral words in the visible condition. The ERP results showed that negative words elicited a larger P2 amplitude in the invisible condition than in the visible condition. The P2 component was enhanced for the neutral words compared with the scrambled words in the visible condition; however, the scrambled words elicited larger P2 amplitudes than the neutral words in the invisible condition. These results suggest that the emotional processing of words is more sensitive than semantic processing in the conscious condition. Semantic processing was found to be attenuated in the absence of awareness. Our findings indicate that P2 plays an important role in the unconscious processing of emotional words, which highlights the fact that emotional processing may be automatic and prioritized compared with semantic processing in the absence of awareness.
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