Implicit vs. Explicit Emotion Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Opinion on the Role of the Cerebellum

摘要

Human beings are continuously exposed to external and internal emotional stimuli which areprocessed to create adaptive social relations. Based on the nature of emotional phenomena and onthe effort required for their elaboration, emotional processing could be viewed along a continuum,ranging from an implicit/unconscious level to an explicit/conscious level (Lane, 2000). The implicitprocessing of emotions is meant to be an automatic, procedural, and non-conceptual process thatdoes not require conscious access to be executed. Instead, explicit processing requires declarativeevaluation and involves higher cognitive resources to define conscious emotional states (Damasio,1994; Lane, 2000).