Subliminal messaging more effective when negative?

A team of UCL researchers say that subliminal messaging is most effective when the message being conveyed is negative. Subliminal images ' in other words, images shown so briefly that the viewer does not consciously 'see' them ' have long been the subject of controversy, particularly in the area of advertising. Previous studies have already hinted that people can unconsciously pick up on subliminal information intended to provoke an emotional response, but limitations in the design of the studies have meant that the conclusions were ambiguous. Today the journal Emotion publishes a study led by Professor Nilli Lavie (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), which provides evidence that people are able to process emotional information from subliminal images and demonstrates conclusively that even under such conditions, information of negative value is better detected than information of positive value. In the Wellcome Trust-funded study, Professor Lavie and colleagues showed fifty participants a series of words on a computer screen. Each word appeared on screen for only a fraction of second - at times only a fiftieth of a second, much too fast for the participants to consciously read the word. The words were either positive (e.g.