Hello Jaume, regarding the chapter “Suboptimal priming…moral judgments” may I ask your thoughts to verify my potential understanding of your work? I am already admiring what your research is giving light to.
Your conclusion is partly “we found that suboptimal affective priming by disgust and fear pictures significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments, but have no effect on non-moral judgments.” If I understand, subliminal priming seems to "pre-date" conscious evaluation and incline it affectively, however it may be fairly non-specific proportional to the degree it is preconscious. In upper consciousness, we seek causal explanations, so we form subjective attributions attached to specific targets; we also do this in any post substantive endeavor. Our higher order reasoning must reconcile with world belief and explain why the world is “not as just as it should be.” So we "imbue" objects with the cause of the event and detach from those rather than the world. It seems to be another dissociative strategy, where the self need do nothing dissociative directly (e.g. exhibit something dramatic like fugue or the list of known DIDs in the DSM), just detach from the event using a material object (usually a person, but often a place or implement too). That object becomes a persistent target for the fear/disgust and one’s inability to reconcile against/with the event (so we can then, “withdraw” tangibly and not stand out too much).
Your work on affective priming seems to indicate we possess “affective pruning” – I am wondering if neuronal pruning actually is at play in deadening affective elevation potentials (a lost “frequency of use”, just as we see in any learned behavior preferences during development, as per Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001)? I ask because inference seems to begin (at least in part) at preconscious levels (such as V4). Either mirror neurons or VENs may be specifically less/more used as a result? In other words, this priming effect may not just be singular, over time it becomes a numbed expectation. This relates so well to my studies on video game/media’s impact on belief and help behavior, so your thoughts on this are appreciated.
Chapter SUBOPTIMAL AFFECTIVE PRIMING BY DISGUST AND HORROR PICTURES ...
Thanks Sachchidanand. Agreed, our degree of exposure as a frequency of experience tends to regulate our subsequent sensitivity to similar stimuli (much as novelty and habituation themselves seem to function). Have you had a chance to look through the work of Craig Anderson? The effect is not just unidirectional (outward), but bidirectional (inward too) so far as how we see and how we respond in a social way. For example, exposure regulates "affective attention" and subsequent "affective arousal" - whether to elicit a fight/aggressive stimulus within, or to detach from empathic observance of others by a similar normative frequency (to no longer feel the need to exhibit help behavior). Do you think this is a sort of nonverbal internal self-organization of stimuli so that "messages" become "distorted" in cognition? It seems to help us adapt by lessening the need to adapt to these difficult stimuli. What do you think?
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