Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings , with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale , through which participants categorize “raw” visual experience, and post-decision wagering , which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR (...) measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of numeracy and the emotion of fear on the decision-making process. While previous research demonstrated that these factors are independently related to search effort, search policy and choice in a decision from experience task, less is known about how their interaction contributes to processing information under uncertainty. We attempted to address this problem and to fill this gap. In the present study, we hypothesized that more numerate people would sample more (...) information about a decision problem and that the effect of fear would depend on the source of this emotion: whether it is integral (i.e., relevant) or incidental (i.e., irrelevant) to a decision problem. Additionally, we tested how these factors predict choices. We addressed these hypotheses in a series of two experiments. In each experiment, we used a sampling paradigm to measure search effort, search policy and choice in nine binary problems included in a decision from experience task. In Experiment 1, before the sampling task we elicited incidental fear by asking participants to recall fearful events from their life. In Experiment 2, integral fear was elicited by asking participants to make choices concerning medical treatment. Decision problems and their payoff distributions were the same in the two experiments and across each condition. In both experiments, we assessed objective statistical numeracy and controlled for a change in the current emotional state. We found that more numerate people sampled more information about a decision problem and switched less frequently between alternatives. Incidental fear marginally predicted search effort. Integral fear led to larger sample sizes, but only among more numerate people. Neither numeracy nor fear were related to the number of choices that maximized expected values. However, across two experiments sample sizes predicted the number of choices that maximized experienced mean returns. The findings suggest that people with higher numeracy may be more sensitive to integral emotions; this may result in more effortful sampling of relevant information leading to choices maximizing experienced returns. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that the activation strength produced by emotional stimuli must pass a threshold level in order to be consciously perceived, contrary to the assumption of continuous quality of representation. An analysis of receiver operating characteristics for attentional blink performance was used to distinguish between two models of emotion perception by inspecting two different ROC’s shapes. Across all conditions, the results showed that performance in the attentional blink task was better described by the two-limbs ROC predicted by (...) the Krantz threshold model than by the curvilinear ROC implied by the signal-detection theory. (shrink)

Attention-driven bias for threat-related stimuli in implicit memory. Preliminary results from the Posner cueing paradigm An implicit memory advantage for angry faces was investigated in this experiment by means of an additional cueing task. Participants were to assess the orientation of a triangle's peak, which side of presentation was cued informatively by angry and neutral face stimuli, after which they immediately completed an unexpected "old-new" task on a set of the previously presented faces and new, distractor-faces. Surprisingly, the RTs were (...) similarly long on the invalid trials for angry and neutral facial cues in the Posner task. However, performance on the "old-new" task was better for angry than neutral faces. A strong correlation between RTs in angry-invalid trials and confidence ratings for these angry faces was observed only in highly reactive participants. These results suggest that presentation of threatening material can induce enhanced incidental encoding which can result in stronger familiarity for such material, and this effect is driven by attentional bias in highly reactive individuals. (shrink)

The anchoring heuristic refers to phenomena when an arbitrary number affects subsequent numerical estimations. Oppenheimer, LeBoeuf and Brewer showed that it is not necessary for the anchor to be a numerical value, yet current models describing the anchoring heuristic do not fully account for the mechanism of non-numerical anchoring. However, this effect shows similarity to the basic anchoring effect - obtained without the comparative question and based on the availability of the given number in working memory. In this study, we (...) attempt to verify whether those two effect share the same psychological mechanism. In Experiment 1, we show that non-numerical anchoring based on magnitude priming cannot be obtained when the lines are just observed. The examined mechanism proves to be dependent on the act of drawing, displaying limitations similar to the basic anchoring effect, previously pointed out by Brewer and Chapman. By using the same numerical anchors in different size formats, in Experiment 2 we showed that anchoring based on magnitude priming occurs even when the numerical values do not affect the estimations. The results are discussed in the light of a possible mechanism that underlies the investigated effect. (shrink)