Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
~ from Mary Oliver’s “Messenger”
Psychological science sometimes confirms our beliefs, and sometimes challenges them. My young adult self never would have guessed that:
- the home “shared environment” effect on our personality traits, sexual orientation, and intelligence is, apart from abuse or neglect, minimal. (Genes and peer influences matter more.) Although our values, politics, and religion are home-influenced, we would, notes behavior geneticist Robert Plomin, “essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.”
- repression rarely occurs. Experience a trauma—a disaster, a parent’s murder, or a battlefield terror—and we’re much more likely to be haunted by unforgettable flashbacks.
- some therapies have disappointingly little long-term effect (think weight-loss programs) while others are surprisingly helpful (electroconvulsive therapy for intractable depression).
But perhaps the biggest revelation has been the enormity of our unconscious information processing. Given the scientific discounting of Freud’s seething unconscious mind, I have been amazed at the extent to which our lives are guided by automatic (unconscious) rather than controlled (conscious) information processing. Witness
- blindsight: brain-damaged people processing visual stimuli that they do not consciously perceive—enabling them to intuitively navigate around unseen objects.
- problem-solving without conscious thinking: our still-working unseen mind spontaneously producing fresh insights after not-thinking (even sleeping).
- implicit memory: learning new skills or conditioned associations without conscious effort or awareness. We know more than we know we know.
- subliminal priming: having our thinking and emotions “primed” by unperceived stimuli. When exposed to a fearsome animal on screen for one-fiftieth of a second, which is then immediately masked with a fuzzy screen, people will perceive only a flash of light—which may, nevertheless, arouse an emotion that influences their judgment of an ensuing perceived stimulus.
Regarding this last nifty unconscious talent, researchers have wondered: If fear responses can be elicited and conditioned without our awareness, might they also be extinguished without our awareness?
For those with phobias, exposure therapy—repeatedly engaging your fears by seeing pictures of what one fears, or of having live exposure to such—helps. But it’s the psychological equivalent of a dental root canal. The result is that many decline the therapy, or drop out. So researchers have pondered: Might stress-free subliminal exposure to feared stimuli help extinguish phobias? Might repeated brief, masked exposure to, say, feared spiders weaken people’s automatic physiological arousal?
In their new Psychological Bulletin analysis of 39 controlled experiments, SUNY Purchase psychologist Paul Siegel and University of Southern California psychiatrist Bradley Peterson report that “exposing phobic persons to their feared stimulus without conscious awareness” works. Those who experience the unconscious exposure therapy become less consciously fearful and less avoidant of the dreaded stimulus. Moreover, physiological measures confirm their decreased fear.
Siegel and his colleagues illustrate: Their controlled experiments exposed some arachnophobic (spider-fearing) people to spiders very briefly (and unconsciously). Afterward, they became less fearful of, and more willing to approach, a live tarantula. The phobia relief, confirmed by diminished physiological arousal, proved lasting. And it surpassed the relief from stressful conscious exposure therapy.
This “very brief exposure” research “positions unconscious exposure as a new treatment for specific phobia,” conclude Siegel and Peterson.
Before appreciating unconscious information processing, I would not have predicted this result, and even now am surprised. But as Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple observed, “facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again.”
The unconscious therapy effect also affirms one of the great insights of modern psychological science: our capacity for dual processing. Our conscious mind presumes that its intentions rule our lives. Yet much of our thinking occurs below the radar of our attention. We have a conscious thinking system, and another thinking system out of sight. Our memory, thinking, language, attitudes, and perceptions operate partly on an aware, deliberate “high road,” but also on a vast, unconscious, automatic “low road.” We are, as the Psalmist observed, “wonderfully made.” Our one amazing brain interweaves two magnificent minds.
(David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.)
