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Emotional awareness refers to the capacity of attending to, identifying, and describing emotions in oneself and in others, and it has been discussed as a factor promoting mental health. It has been shown to be associated with the recognition of others’ verbal and facial emotions at a controlled or explicit processing level. So far, little is known about the relation between emotional awareness and automatic or implicit emotion processing. In the present study, priming techniques were used to assess the processes of automatic evaluative shifts due to masked emotional faces and automatic response facilitation based on masked emotional words. A face- and a word-priming task were administered to 49 healthy women, along with the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS). In the total sample, significant affective priming was obtained in the word priming task. Moreover, significant evaluative shifting due to negative faces was observed. As expected, LEAS correlated positively with affective priming by negative faces and tended to be correlated with affective priming, as measured in the word priming task. The present data suggest that individuals with a high level of emotional awareness exhibit heightened automatic sensitivity for negative facial expressions with respect to influencing affective judgments. More emotionally aware individuals also tend to manifest heightened automatic affective processing on a semantic level. In sum, the results of the present study add to the understanding of the reflective awareness of emotions by revealing links to basic processes of emotion perception that are rapid and occur without intention or effort.

MeSH