TITLE:
Clinical Neuroscience—Towards a Better Understanding of Non-Conscious versus Conscious Processes Involved in Impulsive Aggressive Behaviours and Pornography Viewership
AUTHORS:
Sajeev Kunaharan, Peter Walla
KEYWORDS:
Non-Conscious Affective Processing, Implicit versus Explicit Responses, Electroencephalography (EEG), Startle Reflex Modulation (SRM), Emotion
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.18,
November
24,
2014
ABSTRACT: Assuming that the human mind indeed
consists of a non-conscious and a conscious part it makes sense to believe that
consciousness at times may struggle to get access to non-conscious content,
which seems rather logical. At the same time most of us are aware that
affective processing underlying our emotions happens non-consciously due to
limbic activity that is mostly sub-cortical. Thus, any explicit response to a
question about one’s state of affect is inevitably prone to be inaccurate if
not wrong. Therefore, any therapy, biological and/or psychological that is
based on explicit responses is potentially misleading. With this opinion
article we aim to generate awareness about potential discrepancies between
self-reported versus objectively measured emotion-related states. There is more
to emotion than just subjective feeling and we should start taking non-conscious
emotion-related processes into account.