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

本课题旨在研究面部表情的快速自动处理。具体来说，它将探讨是否以及在多大程度上情绪表达可以（至少主观）无意识地处理超越全球效价激活，以及哪些潜在的过程可以识别。因此，本研究在前人研究的基础上发展了一个新的实验范式，即情感启动范式。在它的基本版本中，参与者根据所表达的情绪对可感知的情绪面孔进行了清晰的分类。在他们之前，他们会被面具和简短的情感面孔所掩盖，这些面孔要么与目标一致，要么不一致。初步证据表明，情绪的无意识处理可以相对详细，尽管似乎不是每种情绪都可以区分。该项目旨在探索，首先，这些影响的边界条件。其次，本研究旨在探索情绪启动效应的理论基础和机制，即我们想知道掩蔽启动效应是否是一种相当“冷”的语义范畴化效应，或者启动是否引发了基本的情绪反应。第三，我们将扩大范式，以进一步了解所涉及的过程，通过使用肌电图。最后，在第四部分，我们将进一步探讨情绪启动效应的个体差异问题，以检验其与人格研究和临床心理学的联系。

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.