Unconscious fear influences emotional awareness of faces and voices

Nonconscious recognition of facial expressions opens an intriguing possibility that two emotions can be present together in one brain with unconsciously and consciously perceived inputs interacting. We investigated this interaction in three experiments by using a hemianope patient with residual nonconscious vision. During simultaneous presentation of facial expressions to the intact and the blind field, we measured interactions between conscious and nonconsciously recognized images. Fear-specific congruence effects were expressed as enhanced neuronal activity in fusiform gyrus, annygdala, and pulvinar. Nonconscious facial expressions also influenced processing of consciously recognized emotional voices. Emotional congruency between visual and an auditory input enhances activity in amygdala and superior colliculus for blind, relative to intact, field presentation of faces. Our findings indicate that recognition of fear is mandatory and independent of awareness. Most importantly, unconscious fear recognition remains robust even in the light of a concurrent incongruent happy facial expression or an emotional voice of which the observer is aware.