Abstracts of the Week
Curated by Ellen Yates
This week’s abstracts explore how emotional signals are processed in the brain, from emojis in digital communication to dissociation and unconscious face perception.
In Scientific Reports, Stoianov et al. (2026) examine how emojis influence visual word recognition. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, the authors found that clearly visible positive emojis facilitated responses and modulated early and late neural activity. When conscious awareness of the emojis was suppressed, this positivity advantage disappeared, while negative emojis continued to produce early neural responses. The findings suggest that positive emotional cues depend on conscious awareness to shape behavior, whereas negative cues may influence processing even under limited awareness.
Stoianov, D., Beyersmann, E., Kemp, N., Wegener, S., & Popov, S. (2026). The Impact of Awareness on Affective Emoji Priming in Visual Word Recognition. Scientific Reports, 16:631.
A study by Heekerens et al. (2026) in Clinical Psychological Science revisits a long-standing question in trauma and personality research: whether dissociation functions as a form of emotion regulation. Combining experience-sampling data from daily life with physiological measures during a laboratory stress task, the authors found that dissociation closely tracked moments of negative affect but did not reduce distress or reliably alter physiological responses. These findings challenge the assumption that dissociation serves a regulatory function and instead suggest it may reflect a maladaptive response to distress.
Heekerens, J. B., et al. (2026). Does dissociation have an emotion-regulation function? Evidence from daily life and the laboratory. Clinical Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026251396803
Finally, Ishida and Mori (2026) examine how gaze direction influences unconscious face perception using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm. Surprisingly, faces with slightly downward gazes were detected more quickly than faces with direct or horizontally averted gazes, although participants were less accurate at identifying the gaze direction. These findings suggest that subtle variations in gaze orientation may shape early visual awareness in ways that are not yet fully understood.
Ishida, M., & Mori, M. (2026). Enhanced awareness of faces with slight downwards gazes in the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm. Cognitive Processing, 27(1), 83–92.
Together, these papers highlight how emotional signals—whether conveyed through digital symbols, internal psychological states, or subtle facial cues—shape perception, attention, and awareness.