Understanding the subliminal affective priming effect of facial stimuli: an ERP study

The subliminal affective priming was studied by recording event-related potential (ERP) to ambiguous neutral faces preceded by 20 ms positive or negative prime faces. Behavioral results showed that positive and negative prime faces led to valance-consistent biases in affective judgments of ambiguous neutral faces. ERP data showed that subliminal primes differentially influenced N100, N300 and vertex positive potential (VPP), with larger amplitudes in negative priming trials. These results support the conclusion that the early perceptual analysis of targets, as well as evaluation and selection of targets, is affected by subliminal affective information. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.