Motivation is often thought to interact consciously with executive control, although recent studies have indicated that motivation can also be unconscious. To date, however, the effects of unconscious motivation on high-order executive control functions have not been explored. Only a few studies using subliminal stimuli (i.e., those not related to motivation, such as an arrow to prime a respons...

All conscious perceptions are alike but each unconscious perception is unconscious in its own way. This “Anna Karenina” (Tolstoy, 1901, first sentence) principle concerning unconscious perception (Block, 2011) holds because conscious perception is a matter of oscillating feed-forward and feed-back signals that are uniform in the essential features of their successes but variegated in their fail...

The Anna Karenina theory says: all conscious states are alike; each unconscious state is unconscious in its own way. This paper argues that many components have to function properly to produce consciousness, but failure in any one of many different ones can yield an unconscious state in different ways. In that sense the Anna Karenina theory is true. But in another respect it is false: kinds of ...

Ever since William James, psychologists of emotion have tended to view affective states as intrinsically conscious. We argue that nonconscious affect also exists, and focus specifically on the possibility of unconscious``liking''. We present evidence that positive and negative affective reactions can be elicited subliminally, while a person is completely unaware of any affective reaction at all...

Brosschot et al. in this issue [1] make a cogent and compelling argument for researchers to pay more attention to the role of unconscious processes. They argue that the prolonged physiological activity of the type that that produces wear and tear on the body and eventual stressrelated illness may be more due to unconscious worry and distress than researchers have previously recognized. This unc...

This survey takes into account the unconscious aspects of emotions and the critical role played in them by the right hemisphere, considering different acceptations of the term ‘unconscious’. In a preliminary step, the nature of emotions, their componential and hierarchical organization and the relationships between emotions and hemispheric specialization are shortly discussed, then different as...

Previous studies have shown that with important decisions, unconscious thought has surprisingly led to better choices than conscious thought. The present study challenges this so-called 'deliberation-without-attention effect' in the medical domain. In a computerized study, physicians and medical students were asked, after either conscious or unconscious thought, to estimate the 5-year survival ...

Relational inference denotes the capacity to encode, flexibly retrieve, and integrate multiple memories to combine past experiences to update knowledge and improve decision-making in new situations. Although relational inference is thought to depend on the hippocampus and consciousness, we now show in young, healthy men that it may occur outside consciousness but still recruits the hippocampus....