M. Balconi, Conscious and unconscious in emotional face processing, Journal of the International
Neuropsychological Society, 9, 188-90, 2003. (in collaborazione con C. Lucchiari).
Current evidence suggest that the process of generating and comprehending an emotion can proceed
outside of conscious awareness. In fact, semantic elaboration of emotional information, that
includes stimuli categorization and meaning attribution, does not require the contribution of
conscious mechanism. Decoding of facial expression of emotion is analysed, considering the
information elaboration in a condition of subliminal (1 ms) and supraliminal (40 ms) stimulation.
The experiment provides brain-event-relates potentials (ERPs). In Phase 1, 21 subject were tested
for ERPs measure in presence of congruous or incongruous (morphed) stimuli representing 5
emotions (anger, surprise, happiness, fear and sadness). Ten electrode sites were considered (FZ;
Cz, Pz and Oz, F3, F4, C3, C4, P3 and P4). The ERPs correlated allowed to show the presence of a
significant semantic effect N400 variation for both subliminal and supraliminal incongruous stimuli.
Nevertheless, the 2 negative-ongoing waves present different cortical distribution: N400-like
supraliminal effect was more frontally right distributed, whereas the N400-like subliminal effect
appeared more right posterior (parietal) distributed. In Phase 2 the subjects were asked to evaluate a
new set of stimuli, both target and non-target. The previous unconscious semantic elaboration of the
stimuli was revealed by ERPs variations, with different profile for target and non-target stimuli.
Specifically, a familiarity effect was observed for the incongruous target stimuli, with a decrease of
the negativity for the N400 peak.