Nonconscious Emotion

Evidence

One source of speculation about the relation between emotion and awareness are the works of Sigmund Freud. Freud clearly believed that people can be wrong about the cause of their emotion (as when a person's anger at his or her boss comes from the similarity of the boss to the person's father) or the exact nature of their emotions (as when a person confuses love with hate). There is little empirical support for Freud's most dramatic speculations. However, some evidence indicates that people can be mistaken about some aspects of their emotional states. For example, one study found that in phobic individuals, negative mood can be elicited by presenting them with fear-relevant snakes and spiders. Another study found that positive mood can be elevated by repeated subliminal presentation of simple geometric figures. Many studies demonstrated that arousal resulting from one source (e.g., crossing a bridge) can be mistaken as deriving from another source (e.g., romantic attraction).

Note, however, that in these studies, people were aware of their emotions (though not of the causes). Could an emotion itself be nonconscious? Among psychologists, the issue is somewhat controversial. Some researchers think that the presence of a conscious feeling (the phenomenal component of emotion) is necessary to call a state an emotion. Other researchers think that conscious feeling is only one aspect of emotion, and the presence of emotion can be detected in behavioral and physiological changes. The latter possibility is supported by several lines of evidence.

First, from the standpoint of evolution and neuroscience, at least some forms of emotional reaction should exist independently of subjective correlates. Evolutionarily speaking, the ability to have conscious feelings is a late achievement compared with the ability to have behavioral affective reactions to emotional stimuli. Basic affective reactions are widely shared by animals, including reptiles and fish, and at least in some species may not involve conscious awareness comparable with that in humans. After all, the original function of emotion was to allow the organism to react appropriately to positive or negative events, and conscious feelings might not always have been required.

[Page 621]The neurocircuitry needed for basic affective responses, such as a positive reaction to a pleasant sensation or a disliking reaction to a threatening stimulus, is largely contained in emotional brain structures that lie below the cortex, such as the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, hypothalamus, and even lower brain stem. These subcortical structures evolved early and may carry out limited operations that are essentially preconscious, compared with the elaborate human cortex at the top of the brain, which is more involved in conscious emotional feelings. Yet even limited subcortical structures on their own are capable of some basic affective reactions. A dramatic demonstration of this point comes from affective neuroscience studies with anencephalic human infants. The brain of such infants is congenitally malformed, possessing only a brain stem, and lacking nearly all structures at the top or front of the brain, including the entire cortex. Yet sweet tastes of sugar still elicit positive facial expressions resembling liking from anencephalic infants, whereas bitter tastes elicit negative facial expressions resembling disgust.

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