Clinical Neuroscience—Towards a Better Understanding of Non-Conscious versus Conscious Processes Involved in Impulsive Aggressive Behaviours and Pornography Viewership

Sajeev Kunaharan¹, Peter Walla^1,2*

¹Functional Neuroimaging Lab, Centre for Translational Neuroscience and Mental Health Research, School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia.
²Department of Psychology, Webster Private University Vienna, Palais Wenkheim, Vienna, Austria.

DOI: 10.4236/psych.2014.518199                

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.

Keywords

Non-Conscious Affective Processing, Implicit versus Explicit Responses, Electroencephalography (EEG), Startle Reflex Modulation (SRM), Emotion

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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