Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca , Italy.
Neuro Mi, Milan Centre for Neuroscience , Italy.
Soc Neurosci. 2020 Aug;15(4):447-457. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2020.1756403. Epub 2020 Apr 26.
In everyday life, our preferences are governed by influences that we are frequently not aware of. Studies investigating visual subliminal priming have shown that emotions are particularly able to modulate the affective judgments both at a behavioural and neural level. In this study, we investigated whether emotional unconscious learning is a core feature of human development, by testing infants as young as 3 months of age on a subliminal affective priming task, in which infants were primed with subliminal happy and angry faces (Experiment 1) or subliminal neutral and scrambled faces (Experiment 2), followed by two neutral objects. We found that arousal to the neutral objects - as indexed through skin conductance - changed when they were primed with faces displaying emotional valence, and particularly anger, but not when the face had a neutral expression. This change in physiological state only partially corresponded to a change in explicit behaviour - as indexed through looking times - suggesting that emotional unconscious learning likely influences explicit behaviour at later stages of development, when subcortical-to-cortical connections have strengthened.
在日常生活中，我们的偏好受到各种我们通常没有意识到的因素的影响。研究表明，情绪特别能够调节行为和神经水平上的情感判断。在这项研究中，我们通过在潜意识情感启动任务中测试 3 个月大的婴儿，来研究情绪无意识学习是否是人类发展的核心特征，在这个任务中，婴儿被潜意识的快乐和愤怒面孔（实验 1）或潜意识的中性和打乱的面孔（实验 2）启动，然后呈现两个中性物体。我们发现，当中性物体被呈现带有情绪效价的面孔（即通过皮肤电导率来索引）时，它们的唤醒程度会发生变化，特别是当呈现愤怒的面孔时，但当面孔呈现中性表情时则不会。这种生理状态的变化与外显行为的变化（通过注视时间来索引）只有部分对应，这表明情绪无意识学习可能会在以后的发展阶段影响外显行为，此时皮质下到皮质的连接已经增强。
