NEURAL CORRELATES OF AFFECTIVE PRIMACY

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Affective primacy refers to the notion that affective reactions are not dependent upon cognitive mediation, and thus affective and cognitive evaluations are to some degree dependent on functionally independent information processing streams with different behavioral dynamics. It is generally thought that affective information processing is endowed with special features: It is largely preattentive/automatic, can occur outside of awareness and prior to the appraisal of more general cognitive and perceptual features. These features of affective processing may be referred to as affective automaticity. The primary aim of this proposal is to apply functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the neural basis of affective automaticity by testing the following hypotheses: 1) Perceptual processing of affective but not neural stimulus dimensions is accomplished independent of attentional resource allocation, 2) Neural responses to affectively significant but not neutral stimuli are evoked prior to and independent of perceptual awareness, and 3) Neural responses to affectively significant stimuli support affective discriminations without awareness.