Letter on Yamada and Decety (2009): Unconscious affective processing and empathy: An investigation of subliminal priming on the detection of painful facial expressions

摘要

Yamada and Decety [4] intended to explore the impact of non-conscious processing of negative and positive affect on the detection of pain in the faces of others. Results as reported by the authors suggest that preceding subliminal processing of negative words significantly increased the pain detection rate compared to the prior priming of positive words. According to the authors, these findings point to a more primitive origin of this effect related to the potential threat signal of pain. However, in our opinion, the authors' interpretation of their data is based on a statistical misinterpretation. Due to our interpretation, the data show the opposite effect as reported by the authors.