The unconscious

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The unconscious
Children perceive inaccurately, are very little
conscious of their inner states and retain
fallacious recollections of occurrences. Many
adults are hardly better. Murray (1938, p. 15)
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Lecture contents

• Pervins illustrative phenomena
• Subliminal perception
• Subliminal conditioning
• Automaticity
• The psychdynamic unconscious
• Telling more than we can know

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Pervins illustrative phenomena

• 1. Subliminal perception
• 2. Implicit memory
• 3. Dissociative phenomena
• 4. Blindsight
• 5. Hypnosis
• 6. Subliminal listening
• 7. Telling more than we know
• 8. Implicit conditioning
• 9. Automatic processing
• 10. Repression
• 11. Implicit thought

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1. Subliminal perception

• Drawn nature scene had more ducks after
  subliminal prime (Eagle et al., 1966. See also
  Poetzl, 1917)
• Self-esteem and memory tapes equally believed but
  not shown to be effective (Greenwald et al.,
  1991)
• Only habitual responses to subliminal
  perception.

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8. Subliminal conditioning (Diven, 1937)

• Participants presented with word and then told to
  say whatever word came to mind.
• Responses to the prime Barn (CS) were
  accompanied by an electric shock (US).
• All participants showed anxiety (GSR) to barn
  UR ? CR.
• Only half of the participants could identify that
  the word Barn preceded the shock.
• Conditioning without awareness of the Conditioned
  Stimulus (CS) or the CS-US (Barn-Shock)
  association.
• Conditioned anxiety generalised to words
  associated with Barn (e.g., sheep)

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8. plus 1. (Katkin et al., 2001)

• Subliminal snake and spider pictures presented.
• Electric shock following certain pictures.
• Better than chance predictions of when shock
  would follow.
• Participants who were best able to detect their
  heartbeat predicted best.
• Hunches and gut feelings as
  semi-consciously perceived conditioned
  responses to subliminally (unconsciously)
  perceived stimuli?
• See next slide.

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8. plus 1. Weins et al. (2003) Sequencophobia!

• Picture-shock pairings in Katkin et al. (2001)
  not random.
• When randomised, could not be predicted better
  than chance.
• Increased prediction only at the time the shock
  expected.
• Some participants reported not consciously
  realising the sequence-shock link, therefore...
• Hunches still based on conditioned responses,
  but to certain times (trial order), not to
  subliminally perceived snakes and spiders.

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9. Automaticity 1Automatic influences on
impression formation

• See priming from the Perceiving Persons
  lecture.
• Context priming of trait terms influences
  interpretation of anothers behaviour (e.g.,
  Higgins et al.s 1977 adventurer)
• See primes and prejudice (?) from the
  Perceiving Groups lecture.
• Priming group characteristics or stereotype
  content elicits full group stereotype
  activation (e.g., Devine, 1999) and possible use
  in evaluations (e.g., Lepore Brown, 1997)

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9. Automaticity 2Automatic influences on
behaviour

• See priming from the Perceiving Persons
  lecture.
• Context priming of traits, stereotypes, or
  motives elicit trait, stereotype, or motive
  consistent behaviour (e.g., Bargh et al.s 1996
  rude participants)

Internal (intentional) and external (automatic)
sources of behavior-relevant cognitions that
automatically create a tendency to engage in that
behavior. Source Bargh Chartrand (1999)
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The psychodynamic unconscious
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Poetzl (1917)

• Subliminal pictoral presentation.
• Dream reports next day include presented
  material.
• Later replicated with free association and
  perception (projection?).
• Evidence of unconscious processing.
• But a nightmare for psychoanalytic theory?

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Defence Mechanisms

• Repression, plus
• Supplementary defence mechanisms
• Denial, isolation, projection, rationalization,
  reaction formation, sublimation, displacement.

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Sublimininal Psychodynamic Activation Method
(SPAM)

• Silverman Weinberger (1985)
• Subliminal mother-merge messages to alleviate
  anxiety and promote therapeutic progress.
• Silverman et al. (1978)
• Subliminal Oedipal conflict enhancement
  (alleviation) worsened (improved) performance.
• Patton (1992)
• Existing eating disorder exacerbated from
  subliminal mother-desertion message.

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Projection A New AccountFrom Newman et al.
(1997)

• Seeing in others the traits most fear and loath
  in self.
• E.g., Mean, evil, unkind, obnoxious, lazy,
  selfish.
• Suppression protects self, but only by making the
  trait hyper-accessible in unconsciousness.
• In turn, this leads to increased application of
  the trait to others.
• People with a repressive style attribute these
  traits in particular to others, from an ambiguous
  descriptive paragraph, but deny as
  self-descriptive (instead stressing their
  opposite characteristics).

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The psychodynamic and cognitive unconscious
Differences

• Dynamic
• 1. Content focus Motive wishes
• 2. Defensive mechanisms
• 3. Distinctly irrational
• 4. Special conditions to make conscious.

• Cognitive
• 1. Content focus Cognitions
• 2. No defensive mechanisms
• 3. Equivalent rationality
• 4. Usual laws of perception and memory.

Possibility of a continuum of (un)consciousness
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7. Telling more than we can know

• Title of Nisbett Wilson (1977). Psy. Rev., 84,
  231-279.
• Understanding of own behaviour often poor
• Remember Asch, Milgram
• Using lay theories, not adequate introspection.
• How true for any given self-report measure (e.g.,
  trait)?
• Need to match level of specificity
• E.g., trait measures to predict a class of
  behaviour
• E.g., attitude to a specific behaviour to predict
  that behaviour
• Even so, is recall and recognition up to the job?

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