What does it mean to feel emotion? It seems obvious that at this moment you should be feeling something different from your usual, calm inner state. If you are happy but do not know about it, in what sense are you then happy?
This reasoning seemed quite logical to William James. He believed that awareness of sensation is precisely what distinguishes emotions from other states of the psyche, for example, desires. Without physical sensations of the body, he wrote, "nothing will remain of the emotion, no" psychic material "from which this emotion could be formed." Sigmund Freud also agreed with this point of view: "The essence of emotion is that we must feel it, that is, it must enter consciousness."
Figures depicting Sigmund Freud
But emotions are complex enough. Even when we experience an emotion, we are usually not aware of the full range of nuances associated with it. For example, clinical psychologists often advise patients with uncontrolled anger problems to watch for warning signs, such as sweating palms or clenching the jaws, in order to be aware of and mitigate an impending rage. And when we are frightened or sexually aroused, our breathing and heart rate often go unnoticed (although we notice changes if pointed out to us). Moreover, fear can sometimes covertly increase sexual arousal - or be mistaken for the latter.
Consider an experiment in 1974. An attractive female interviewer approached the men with a request to fill out a questionnaire. Some of the men were on a dangerous suspension bridge, and some on a completely safe one. It found that the men on the dangerous bridge responded to questions with more sexual connotations and were more likely to continue talking to the interviewer after the survey ended. This suggests that the men on the dangerous bridge unconsciously mistook their bodies' reaction to danger for their reaction to a woman's attractiveness.
But how is it possible to demonstrate unconscious emotions in action? We know that emotions affect us. For example, when we are in a good mood, we perceive everything more positively. If we simulate a situation in which an emotion has the predicted effect, although the observables report that they are not experiencing it, then we can gain valuable evidence.
Promotional video:
These are the experiments that psychologists Peter Winckelmann and Kent Berridge conducted in 2004. They showed the volunteers images of happy and sad faces, but they did it at great speed, so that the subjects did not even understand what they were seeing. Then the participants were asked to try and rate the new lemon-lime drink. When asked what they were feeling, they replied that they did not feel any change in mood. However, those who were shown happy faces rated the drink higher and drank more of it.
Why can some unconscious forms of happiness influence us? As Winckelmann and Berridge note: “From an evolutionary and neuroscientific perspective, there is good reason to believe that at least some forms of emotional responses can exist independently of our consciousness. From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to consciously feel emotions is probably one of the latest advances."
Emotions were probably originally designed to work without getting into consciousness, and they continue to do this to this day. “The original function of emotion was to allow the body to respond appropriately to good and bad events, and conscious feelings were not always necessary,” Winckelmann and Berridge conclude.
Moreover, in one of the works of 2005, the difference in brain reactions to conscious and unconscious fear was demonstrated. The researchers believed their work would help to understand the mechanism of action of PTSD, which, they said, is "automatic and not amenable to direct conscious control."
If you think about it, isn't it strange that the existence of unconscious emotions was previously considered implausible? After all, who among us has not seen a person shouting in anger: "I'm not angry!"
Evgeniya Yakovleva