Psychology:
In the past century, a number various articles have been published on subliminal perception and subliminal persuasions. Researchers throughout the world agree on a number of well documented findings and also argue about the most recent findings. It is well known that subliminal persuasion is quite controversial and hence a subject of much discussion. Despite numerous findings demonstrating effects of subliminal perception, many people still argue that it does not exist. For instance , drew the conclusion that subliminal perception had never been reliably demonstrated which led some scholars to argue on the belief that we might be influenced by the factors which we are not aware of. The mere exposure effect, whereby the preference for stimulus increases with repeated stimulus exposures, is a huge and important phenomenon in psychology. It has been consistently been replicated not only across cultures, but also species.
The empirical studies of subliminal perception started over a century ago where participants could discriminate objects on the basis of their weights even when the weight was too small to be detected consciously. After choosing between the objects, they indicated their confidence on a scale of 0 to 3 with a higher score representing more confidence. On almost all trials, they chose zero. However, they chose the correct object on more than 60% of the occasions. The minor differences in weight might have escaped consciousness, unconscious processes dealt with them with reasonable accuracy.
In other works done by Sidis, subjects were shown cards containing a single digit or a single letter, but these cards were so far away that the subject “saw nothing but a dim, blurred spot or dot. In reality, the subjects often complained of not seeing anything at all and even the blurred dim spot often disappeared from the field of vision. However, when Sidis asked the subjects to name the character on the card, their outcome were found to be correct more often than it would be expected on basis of pure guessing, even though many stated “they might as well shut their eyes and guess.
Finally, other researches show that affective reactions can be produced in the absence of the stimulus knowledge. Subliminal smiling and fearful faces were presented to participants while the brain activity was recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Significant increases in Amygdala activities were obtained in response to fearful faces and decreases were obtained in response to smiling faces. Pontz also investigated the subliminal perception consequences on imagery during dreams. Pictures were shown to various participants for short durations (10 milliseconds). They predicted that although the pictures did not reach conscious awareness, they would remain active subconsciously long enough to be able to present themselves in dreams. According to him, some of the images recurred in the dreams of the experiment participants. Based on the findings, it can be seen that the subject of subliminal perception is still a confusing one and thereby the need to undertake more work on the said topic.
It was hypothesized that the students would rate the pre-exposed faces more attractive than the one which they had never seen before. The study also hypothesizes that the faces on the red background will be rated as more attractive than the faces on the blue background.
The current study aims to;
- Investigate whether subliminal pre-exposure to faces increases the subsequent ratings of attractiveness.
METHODOLOGY
Participants
The study conducted involved 1009 students 623 of whom were female and 386 males who were randomly selected from the school. The total sample had a mean age of 19.5 years.
Apparatus
In the training phase, the students were exposed to pictures of faces for extremely short period of time (17 milliseconds) and then the pictures were covered with a random pattern of dots. This ensured that it was not possible to distinguish the details of the faces on the screen in a way that they could even not tell whether there were pictures at all. The students were asked to press the space bar whenever they saw letter X o n the screen in order to maintain the attention on the screen throughout the period of the test.
For half of the students, they were presented with the faces subliminally presented on a red background (red group) and the others were presented on a blue background (blue group).
Procedure
At the end of the experiment during the test phase, the students were asked to rate the attractiveness of 20 different faces (10 males and 10 females; all presented on a white background) on a 10-point scale ranging from ‘Not attractive at all’ to ‘Extremely attractive.’ However, unbeknown to them, 10 of these faces had been subliminally exposed to them (5 males and 5 female) previously. In addition to the pre-exposed faces, they were asked to rate the attractiveness of 10 new faces in similar scale to the one applied for the previously exposed ones.
References
Holender, D. (1986). Semantic activation without concious identification in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual masking: A survey ans appraissal. The Behavioural and Brain Sciences , 1-66.
Merikle, P. M., & Reingold, E. M. (1992). Measuring unconscious perceptual processes. New York: Guilford.
Monahan, J. L., Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (2000). SUBLIMINAL MERE EXPOSURE:Specific, General, and Diffuse Effects. New York: National institute of mental health.
Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. B. (1993). Social psychology across cultures. New York: Harvester wheatsheaf.
Smith, P. K. (2002). The power of the subliminal: On subliminal persuasion and other potential applications. New York: Oxford University Press.
