Complexity and underlying processes of unconscious processing of facial expressions of emotions.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Wentura
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2010 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 177190853

The current project aims at researching the fast and automatic processing of facial emotional expressions. Specifically, it will be explored whether and to what extent emotional expressions can be (at least subjectively) unconsciously processed beyond global valence activations and which underlying processes can be identified. Therefore, a new experimental paradigm has been developed based on previous research with the affective priming paradigm. In its basic version, participants categorize clearly perceivable emotional faces with regard to the expressed emotion. They are preceded by masked and briefly presented emotional faces, which are either congruent or incongruent to the target. Preliminary evidence suggests that unconscious processing of emotions can be relatively detailed, although it seems that not each emotion might be differentiated. The project aims at exploring, first, the boundary conditions of these effects. Second, the project aims at exploring the theoretical basis and underlying mechanisms of the emotion priming effects, that is, we want to know whether the masked priming effect is a rather “cold” semantic categorization effect or whether primes elicit rudimentary emotional reactions. Third, we will broaden the paradigm to further understand the involved processes by using electromyography. Finally, in the fourth section, we will further explore the issue of individual differences in the emotion priming effect to test the connectivity to personality research and clinical psychology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Juliane Degner