The present investigation compared the effectiveness of an audible relaxation strategy and a subliminal suggestion strategy for lowering blood pressure in a normotensive population. These strategies were compared with each other and with a control group. Data were obtained from 108 females and 37 males on: 1) baseline systolic and diastolic blood pressure; and 2) end of treatment systolic and diastolic blood pressure.It was anticipated that if there was a difference between group means on the dependent measures, the difference would occur between 1) the audible relaxation instruction and the control conditions, and 2) the subliminal suggestion and the control conditions. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance was used to determine pretreatment equivalence of blood pressure in the three treatment groups. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance was used to test for statistical significance on the end of treatment data.The findings revealed that neither treatment strategy was more effective than the other, nor more effective than the control group at the end of treatment. Even though there were slight reductions from pretreatment blood pressure to end of treatment blood pressure in each group, there were no significant differences among groups. The validity and generalizability of these findings were discussed in light of previous research. Recommendations were made for further research.

Most of the recent research in the area of subliminal perception has centered on the visual mode of stimulus presentation. The preponderance of that research is concerned with a technique that is hypothesized to stimulate the activation of an unconscious symbiotic merging fantasy which is purported to have an ameliorative effect on pathology. The present study explored the possibility of a merging-like fantasy activation through auditory subliminal means utilizing a population, of 30 VA inpatients with the diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. In a double blind procedure, the subjects received three successive treatments with scores analyzed for significance by multivariate and trend analysis. Dependent variables consisted of Form X-1 of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and the physiological measure of skin temperature. It was hypothesized that the auditory mode of psychodynamic activation would prove effective and that there would be a significant reduction in state anxiety. The results of this study did not support the specific effectiveness of auditory subliminal psychodynamic activation for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder. Self-report of perceived state anxiety decreased significantly for both the treatment and control groups as measured by the STAI, and there was a significant trend in the temperature data for both groups. There were, however, no significant differences between the two groups.

Thesis (M.M.) Florida State University, 2007. / Advisor: Jayne Standley, Florida State University College of Music. Title and description form dissertation home page (viewed 4-6-2009). Document formatted into pages; contains 53 pages.

Selective attention has been studied extensively and it is shown, for example, that individuals with conditions such as anxiety show attention bias to threat-related stimuli. It has been proposed that humans are predisposed or that it is naturally adaptive to selectively attend to emotional stimuli (Lang, 2000). Similarly, LeDoux (1996) and others have proposed limbic brain networks allowing for quick and automatic, but sometimes inaccurate, processing of emotion which bypasses primary cortical areas. Along these lines, automatic attention bias to subliminal image cues in an adapted Posner Covert Attention Task was examined in the current study. A sample of 64 participants was used in each of three separate experiments to examine how individuals were cued subliminally by negative or positive emotional vs. neutral images and the modulation of covert attention by emotion. Due to automatic or motivated attention to emotionally salient stimuli, participants were expected to be facilitated in task performance by negative and positive emotional image cues, relative to neutral cues. Further, state anxiety and depression were expected to impact performance on emotional cueing as well. As expected in Experiment 1, subliminal images produced significant covert attentional cueing and only negative image cues compared to neutral ones produced response time (RT) reduction by valid cueing across both cue-target delay conditions. Further, cueing differences between neutral and negative images were seen only at short delays, supporting differential subliminal processing of emotional cues in attentional paradigms and supporting previous evidence of unconscious fear processing and specialized automatic fear networks. Moreover, in Experiment 2, when delays following subliminal cues were extended further, emotional cues did not differentially modulate covert attention, suggesting that subliminal emotional cueing seems to occur more immediately. Positive subliminal imagery in Experiment 3 was largely unsuccessful in differentially modulating covert attention compared to neutral cues, suggesting that positive information is either not effective in modulating covert attention or occurs over similar immediate time durations as negative cues in Experiment 1. Finally, the presence of self-reported state anxiety and depression affected task performance, especially in Experiment 1 negative for subliminal discrimination of negative vs. neutral image cues. Overall, the current study adds to the research literature which demonstrates that emotional information, especially negative imagery processed at short intervals, can be processed below awareness to modulate attention in a different manner than less salient neutral stimuli and this modulation is further influenced by state anxiety or depressive symptomatology. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.

Grado de magíster en nuerociencias / La memoria de trabajo consiste en la capacidad para mantener en la memoria cierta cantidad de información por un breve periodo de tiempo, cuyos principales mecanismos han sido estudiados clásicamente bajo paradigmas conscientes y la evidencia con respecto a si ésta puede operar mediante procesos sub atencionales es materia de reciente discusión. Este trabajo busca determinar cómo la aparición de estímulos subliminales neutros y otros con contenido emocional durante la fase de mantención mental de la MT, afecta el rendimiento de este tipo de memoria a corto plazo. El rendimiento, en base a porcentajes de acierto y tiempos de reacción de los sujetos, durante una prueba de memoria de trabajo tipo Sternberg, se vio disminuido cuando un estímulo de naturaleza negativa (expresión facial de rabia) fue presentado durante la mantención activa de items neutros. A su vez, en algunas de nuestras pruebas el rendimiento aumentó cuando un estímulo subliminal concordaba con los memorandos mantenidos en la memoria o cuando dicho estímulo era de carácter positivo (expresión facial de alegría). En una tarea complementaria, se pudo observar que los estímulos presentados a 16 milisegundos (subliminales) efectivamente estuvieron por debajo del umbral de percepción total consciente de los sujetos gracias a la utilización de una escala subjetiva de percepción (Perceptual Awareness Scale). Estos resultados se muestran acordes con la literatura que propone que la memoria de trabajo es permeable a cierto tipo de estímulos inconscientes a la vez que entrega evidencia acerca de posibles mecanismos subliminales que participan en la memoria de trabajo. / The working memory is the hability to keep in mind a relative small amount of information for a brief time. This kind of short term memory has been studied mostly under conscious conditions and there is a lack of evidence about the participation of unaware mechanisms over it. The present work intends to determinate how the presence of subliminal stimulus affects the performance in a type Sternberg working memory task depending on the emotional content of these stimuli. The performance (accuracy and response times) decreased when a negative emotion (angry face) appears at 16 ms during the retention period of neutral items. At the same time the performance was enhanced when the subliminal stimuli had positive emotional content (happy face) or when neutral stimuli, presented subliminally during the retention period, matches the initial and the target figure. Using the Perceptual Awareness Scale, we also proved that stimuli presented during 16 ms were efectively percibed as subliminal by the subjects. We conclude that these results are in accordance with previous evidence that has shown that working memory is permeable to certain types of subliminal stimuli. These stimuli can affect the conscious mechanisms of working memory.

Subliminal perception is defined as a process whereby a subject reports no awareness of a visual stimulus, and yet his/her verbal behavior, subjectively experienced as “guesses”, is influenced by the stimulation. Various studies have found evidence for and against subliminal perception using discrimination tasks and subjective judgments. Explanations of subliminal perception include the partial cue hypothesis, the theory of perception of structural differences, and the theory that responses to subliminal stimuli are of a semantic nature. This study was conducted to determine whether subliminal perception involves a discrimination of structural characteristics or a discrimination of the semantic quality of words prior to specific identification. It was also an attempt to find the relationship between the level of stimulus awareness and the type of response.

Social anxiety describes a marked and persistent fear of negative evaluation in social performance situations that invariably evokes anxiety. In the following study, three dimensions of perception and information processing in context of social anxiety were covered: distinctions between state and trait anxiety, implicit associations, and subliminal priming. Implicit associations may be defined as unconscious cognitive processes related to one's preferences and biases. Implicit associations may also affect how quickly an individual perceives a threatening situation. Exposure to subliminal stimuli also appears to have an effect on the perception of stress-inducing stimuli. This research examined how subliminal priming may influence implicit associations. Results from the present study suggested that the implicit associations of social anxiety were minimally but significantly related to explicit reports of anxiety. Subliminal priming significantly influenced the participants' implicit associations of social anxiety.

Med marknader som blir allt mer globaliserade skapas fler möjligheter för företagen att etablera sig i världen samtidigt. Detta har även lett till en hårdare konkurrens vilket skapat svårigheter för företagen att sticka ut och göra sig hörda bland mängden. Med dessa ökande svårigheter kan därför subliminal priming tänkas vara ett praktiskt verktyg för att nå ut till konsumenterna. Subliminal priming handlar om att påverka människors undermedvetna till olika preferenser och beteende och är ett ämne som inom forskarvärlden länge studerats men som fick ett ökat intresse i slutet av 1950-talet. Bland den forskning som bedrivits så har kriterierna behov, motivation, neutralitet samt kort tidsaspekt tagits fram som förutsättningar för att effekt av subliminal priming ska kunna uppstå. Dock finns ännu inte mycket forskning alls kring om subliminal priming går att använda praktiskt i reklamsammanhang eller om det ens fungerar under icke- kontrollerade omständigheter. Syftet med denna studie blev därför att genom en kvantitativ ansats undersöka om produktplacering i TV-serier kan ha någon inverkan som subliminal priming i dagens samhälle, om de kriterier som forskarna lagt fram är krav för att konsumenterna ska vara mottagliga för att låta sig påverkas eller ej och om uppmärksammande om produktplacering skapar negativ förändring på attityd. Genomförandet skedde genom att studenter tilldelades en webbenkät där de bland annat fick gradera sina törst-behov och titta på ett klipp från “Orange is the new black”. Slutresultaten indikerade på att produktplaceringen i detta TV-serieklipp kunde ha effekt som subliminal priming när respondenterna uppfyllde alla kriterierna men även då endast några av kriterierna uppfylldes.

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