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Conscious awareness to the events and stimuli around us is a central part of our everyday experience. Yet, are humans the only species that experiences conscious awareness? Since non-verbal species cannot report their internal states, philosophers and scientists have long debated whether the question of animal consciousness is empirically testable, and it still remains a topic of speculation (Dawkins, 2015; Gutfreund, 2017). In the large spectrum of views, some advocate that consciousness may require complex processes like language, a capacity that is unique to adult humans (Dennett, 1995) or a human-like theory of mind (Carruthers, 1998), which may extend to only a few selected species such as great apes (e.g., Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, & Tomasello, 2016; but see Horschler, MacLean, & Santos, 2020). In contrast, others have used neuroanatomical similarities to argue that a number of species (including some birds and octopuses) are likely to be capable of generating conscious experience (see, for example, the Cambridge declaration on consciousness, 2012). Others argue that non-human animals are conscious on the basis of intelligent behaviors which, at least in humans, seem to coincide with conscious awareness as supporting evidence for animal consciousness. These include behaviors such as planning (Osvath & Osvath, 2008), or metacognition (Hampton, Engelberg, & Brady, 2020; Rosati & Santos, 2016), for review see Boly et al., 2013; Griffin & Speck, 2004. Yet, since many complex human behaviors and high-level functions can be performed outside of conscious awareness (i.e., Hassin, 2013), it is difficult to determine whether non-human animals that display intelligent behaviors are indeed conscious or not (Carruthers, 2018). Furthermore, given the ambiguity and difficulty in disentangling conscious from non-conscious processes in non-verbal species, many consider the question of animal consciousness as far from having been resolved (Dawkins, 2015; Gutfreund, 2017). For many, the gap in evidence needed to unambiguously infer animal consciousness is considered “as wide as ever” (Dawkins, 2012).

Fluency, the subjective experience of ease associated with information processing, has been shown to affect a host of judgments. Previous research has typically focused on specific factors that affect the use of a single, specific fluency source. In the present study we examine how cognitive mindsets, or processing modes, moderate fluency emanating from two simultaneous sources of fluency. As a cognitive mindset manipulation, participants performed Jacoby's process dissociation paradigm. Subsequently, participants engaged in a metamemory task that incorporates (and can separately measure the influence of) two simultaneous sources of fluency: familiarity and accessibility. Our results confirmed that our content-unrelated mindset procedure had affected the use of fluency. Moreover, the use of both fluency sources was attenuated, demonstrating the generality of the effect. The findings highlight the causal dependency of fluency on a complex, cognitively-rich environment. (Contains 1 figure.)

We propose that experience of emotion is a mental phenomenon, which requires resources. This hypothesis implies that a concurrent cognitive load diminishes the intensity of feeling since the 2 activities are competing for the same resources. Two sets of experiments tested this hypothesis. The first line of experiments (Experiments 1-4) examined the intensity of participants' feelings as they performed a secondary (backward counting) task. The results showed that the intensity of both negative and positive feelings diminished under a cognitive load and that this attenuation of feeling was not mediated by either distraction from external stimuli or demand characteristics. In the second set of experiments (Experiments 5-6), load was created by asking the participants to focus on the feelings. Even in these circumstances, the participants who were under load reported a lower intensity of feeling than those who were not under load. We explain these findings in terms of a resource-dependent model of emotional experience. Possible implications of our findings for a broader class of phenomenological experiences are succinctly discussed. (Contains 4 footnotes, 4 tables, and 4 figures.)

Numerous studies have demonstrated that Huntington's disease mutation-carriers have deficient explicit recognition of isolated facial expressions. There are no studies, however, which have investigated the recognition of facial expressions embedded within an emotional body and scene context. Real life facial expressions are typically embedded in contexts which may dramatically change the emotion recognized in the face. Moreover, a recent study showed that the magnitude of the contextual bias is modulated by the similarity between the actual expression of the presented face and the facial expression that would typically fit the context, e.g. disgust faces are more similar to anger than to sadness faces and, consequently, are more strongly influenced by contexts expressing anger than by contexts expressing sadness. Since context effects on facial expression perception are not explicitly controlled, their pattern serves as an implicit measure of the processing of facial expressions. In this study we took advantage of the face-in-context design to compare explicit recognition of face-expressions by Huntington's disease mutation-carriers, with evidence for processing the expressions deriving from implicit measures. In an initial experiment we presented a group of 21 Huntington's disease mutation-carriers with standard tests of face-expression recognition. Relative to controls, they displayed deficits in recognizing disgust and anger faces despite intact recognition of these emotions from non-facial images. In a subsequent experiment, we embedded the disgust faces on images of people conveying sadness and anger as expressed by body language and additional paraphernalia. In addition, sadness and anger faces were embedded on context images conveying disgust. In both cases participants were instructed to categorize the facial expressions, ignoring the context. Despite the deficient explicit recognition of isolated disgust and anger faces, the perception of the emotions expressed by the faces was affected by context in Huntington's disease mutation-carriers in a similar manner as in control participants. Specifically, they displayed the same sensitivity to face-context pairings. These findings suggest that, despite their impaired explicit recognition of facial expressions, Huntington's disease mutation-carriers display relatively preserved processing of the same facial configurations when embedded in context. The results also show intact utilization of the information elicited by contextual cues about faces expressing disgust even when the actually presented face expresses a different emotion. Overall, our findings shed light on the nature of the deficit in facial expression recognition in Huntington's disease mutation-carriers as well as underscore the importance of context in emotion perception.

Across three experiments, the nonconscious perception of American cues increase the accessibility of aggressive constructs in memory, aggressive and negative judgments of other people, and aggressive displays of behavior following a mild provocation. These effects emerge only for American participants who regularly follow the American political news media. For American participants who do not follow the news, these effects are absent or tend to be in the opposite direction. Participants' political party orientation (Republican vs. Democratic) does not moderate any of the results. Interpretations and implications of the findings are discussed. Keywords: implicit social cognition; nationalism; ideology; aggression

Six studies examined the goal contagion hypothesis, which claims that individuals may automatically adopt and pursue a goal that is implied by another person's behavior. Participants were briefly exposed to behavioral information implying a specific goal and were then given the opportunity to act on the goal in a different way and context. Studies 1-3 established the goal contagion phenomenon by showing that the behavioral consequences of goal contagion possess features of goal directedness: (a) They are affected by goal strength, (b) they have the quality of goal appropriateness, and (c) they are characterized by persistence. Studies 4-6 show that people do not automatically adopt goals when the observed goal pursuit is conducted in an unacceptable manner, because the goal will then be perceived as unattractive. The results are discussed in the context of recent research on automatic goal pursuits.