Piotr Winkielman: UC San Diego Department of Psychology

My talk explores the relation between emotion and conscious experience. Conscious feelings are typically viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. In contrast, I will argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious (i.e., occur without the accompanying subjective experience). Theoretically, my argument is anchored in evolutionary considerations that systems underlying basic emotions originated prior to systems for supporting conscious awareness, and in functional considerations that consciousness is often unnecessary for emotions to do their job. These considerations are consistent with evidence from neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience evidence suggests that subcortical brain systems, including the brain stem and the “limbic system” underlie both basic ‘‘liking/disliking’’ reactions and more complex reactions, such as fear, disgust, or desire. Further, psychological evidence suggests that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence people’s preference judgments, monetary decision and even complex behavior, such as the amount of beverage they consume. Finally, I will discuss the interactions of conscious and unconscious components of emotion, and conditions under which these components become coupled and decoupled.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Winkielman_16.5.05_b.pdf