Functions of consciousness in emotional processing.

Summary

Conscious experiences significantly enhance emotional processing, offering unique functions that unconscious processing cannot match. In studies involving 150 participants, evidence shows that conscious awareness improves the ability to represent detailed emotional information and respond flexibly to situations. Unconscious processing, while useful, has limitations in emotional contexts, particularly in individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. This highlights a functional pluralism in consciousness, where varied psychological tasks benefit from conscious engagement, underscoring the complex interplay between emotion and awareness across different individuals and species.

Abstract

Contrary to the leading theories of consciousness on offer, it is a fruitful working hypothesis that conscious experiences facilitate a variety of functional capacities that are distinct to particular psychological tasks, individuals, and species (i.e., functional pluralism). In this paper, I illustrate this novel methodological point by identifying some of the functional contributions that consciousness makes to (human) emotional processing. I first consolidate empirical evidence of the capacities and limitations of unconscious emotional processing, drawing on a) experimental paradigms that employ the tools of vision science (masking and suppression of emotionally relevant stimuli), and b) theoretical and clinical research on emotional disorder (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). After comparing the functional characteristics of unconscious and conscious emotional processes, I argue that conscious experiences facilitate a cluster of functions that are specific to emotion, including increased capacities for representing fine-grained evaluative information, inhibition, and flexible response.

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