Influence Without Awareness
In a study on emotion and perception, children at a summer camp judged the characteristics of faces in photographs before and after playing a "scary" game of "murder." The amount of maliciousness or evil seen by the C'hildren in the faces was much greater after the game than before. The emotional state aroused by the game caused the youngsters to perceive the faces differently than before.
Emotional states may even operate at a level so primitive that they influence perception before the individual is aware of the stimulus. This is indicated by an experiment in which subjects studied a list of nonsense syllables. Certain of these syllables were always accompanied by an electric shock on the subject's hand. Shock normally induces an electrical skin response which can be accurately recorded. After a number of pairings of syllable and shock it was possible to omit the shock and get the electrical skin response by presenting only the syllable. Now the experimenter presented the syllables in an exposure device for extremely short periods of time. The subjects gave the electrical sldn response before they recognized the syllable. For syllables that were not accompanied originally by shock, the effect was not nearly so pronounced. It would seem that the shock syllables came to be threatening syllables, and their general fearful character was perceived before the detailed makeup of the syllables themselves.
