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The psychological unconscious. Found, lost, and regained.

In response to Greenwald's article on contemporary research on unconscious mental processes, the authors address three issues: (a) the independence of much recent research and theory from psychodynamic formulations; (b) the broad sweep of the psychological unconscious, including implicit perception, memory, thought, learning, and emotion; and (c) the possibility that the analytic power of unconscious processing may depend both on the manner in which mental contents are rendered unconscious and the manner in which they are to be processed.

Awareness↗

Nonconscious acquisition of information.

The authors review and summarize evidence for the process of acquisition of information outside of conscious awareness (covariations, nonconscious indirect and interactive inferences, self-perpetuation of procedural knowledge). Data indicate that as compared with consciously controlled cognition, the nonconscious information-acquisition processes are not only much faster but are also structurally more sophisticated, in that they are capable of efficient processing of multidimensional and interactive relations between variables. Those mechanisms of nonconscious acquisition of information provide a major channel for the development of procedural knowledge that is indispensable for such important aspects of cognitive functioning as encoding and interpretation of stimuli and the triggering of emotional reactions.

Algorithms↗

Unconscious influences revealed. Attention, awareness, and control.

Recent findings of dissociations between direct and indirect tests of memory and perception have renewed enthusiasm for the study of unconscious processing. The authors argue that such findings are heir to the same problems of interpretation as are earlier evidence of unconscious influences--namely, one cannot eliminate the possibility that conscious processes contaminated the measure of unconscious processes. To solve this problem, the authors define unconscious influences in terms of lack of conscious control and then describe a process dissociation procedure that yields separate quantitative estimates of the concurrent contributions of unconscious and consciously controlled processing to task performance. This technique allows one to go beyond demonstrating the existence of unconscious processes to examine factors that determine their magnitude.

Attention↗

Subliminal processing of emotional information in anxiety and depression.

The study investigated selective processing of emotional information in anxiety and depression using a modified Stroop color naming task. Anxious (n = 19), depressed (n = 18), and normal control (n = 18) subjects were required to name the background colors of anxiety-related, depression-related, positive, categorized, and uncategorized neutral words. Half of the words were presented supraliminally, half subliminally. Anxious subjects, compared with depressed and normal subjects, showed relatively slower color naming for both supraliminal and subliminal negative words. The results suggest a preattentive processing bias for negative information in anxiety.

Adolescent↗

The use of subliminal psychodynamic activation in the study of repression.

Female undergraduates (N = 33) selected for the presence of high sexual guilt were divided into two groups. One group evidenced a high degree of personality development from which it was inferred that they were prone toward (a) the use of repression rather than more primitive defenses and (b) oedipal rather than preoedipal conflict. The second group evidenced a lesser degree of personality development, and hence the above inferences did not apply. The subliminal psychodynamic activation method was used with both groups to investigate the effects on repression of intensifying and diminishing unconscious conflict over sexual wishes. Subjects were exposed to the verbal stimuli "LOVING DADDY IS WRONG" (conflict intensifying), "LOVING DADDY IS OK" (conflict reducing), and "PEOPLE ARE WALKING" (neutral control), each accompanied by a congruent picture both before (in one condition) and after (in another) a recall test of both neutral and sexual material. The conflict-reduction condition did not affect memory of the passages, but the conflict-intensification condition did for the group with the greater degree of personality development, when this condition was presented before the material to be remembered, and for the recall of neutral passages. The special conditions necessary for demonstration of repression are viewed as shedding light on why it has previously been difficult to show evidence of repression in laboratory experiments.

Conflict, Psychological↗

Misattribution, preparatory information, and speech anxiety.

In two experiments with undergraduate subjects, I compared the effects of misattribution versus information manipulations on speech anxiety. In Experiment 1, some subjects were allegedly exposed to subliminal noise while reading a speech in front of a camera. These subjects were told that subliminal noise makes people feel either unpleasantly aroused or pleasantly relaxed or that it has no effect. Subjects in a fourth condition were given accurate information about how they would feel (unpleasantly aroused) but were not exposed to the subliminal noise misattribution source. In Experiment 2, I replicated the arousing noise and accurate information conditions from the first study and added two new groups incorporating a delay that should preclude misattribution. In both experiments, the alleged presence of arousing subliminal noise reduced subjects' speech dysfluencies during the speech task, whereas the presentation of accurate information alone did not have a comparable ameliorative effect. Thus, both experiments supported the misattribution interpretation of why neutral labels for arousal can reduce emotionality.

Anxiety↗

Additivity of nonconscious affect: combined effects of priming and exposure.

Affect deriving from 2 independent sources--repeated exposure and affective priming--was induced, and the combined effects were examined. In each of 4 studies, participants were first shown 72 Chinese ideographs in which the frequency of exposure was varied (0, 1, or 3). In the second phase participants rated ideographs that were primed either positively, negatively, or not at all. The 4 studies were identical except that the exposure duration--suboptimal (4 ms) or optimal (1 s)--of both the initial exposure phase and the subsequent priming phase was orthogonally varied. Additivity of affect was obtained only when affective priming was suboptimal, suggesting that nonconscious affect is diffuse. Affect whose source was apparent was more constrained. Interestingly, increases in liking generated through repeated exposures did not differ as a function of exposure duration.

Adult↗

Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping.

This research demonstrates that subliminally activated stereotypes can alter judgments about oneself and can change cognitive performance. In the first study, an intervention that activated positive stereotypes of aging without the participants' awareness tended to improve memory performance, memory self-efficacy, and views of aging in old individuals; in contrast, an intervention that activated negative stereotypes of aging tended to worsen memory performance, memory self-efficacy, and views of aging in old participants. A second study demonstrated that for the strong effects to emerge from the shifting stereotypes, the stereotypes must be important to one's self-image: Young individuals randomly assigned to the same conditions as the old participants in the first study did not exhibit any of the significant interactions that emerged among the old participants. This research highlights the potential for memory improvement in old individuals when the negative stereotypes of aging that dominate the American culture are shifted to more positive stereotypes.

Adolescent↗