Clinical Neuroscience—Towards a Better Understanding of Non-Conscious versus Conscious Processes Involved in Impulsive Aggressive Behaviours and Pornography Viewership

Abstract

Assuming that the human mind indeed consists of a non-conscious and a conscious part it makes sense to believe that consciousness at times may struggle to get access to non-conscious content, which seems rather logical. At the same time most of us are aware that affective processing underlying our emotions happens non-consciously due to limbic activity that is mostly sub-cortical. Thus, any explicit response to a question about one’s state of affect is inevitably prone to be inaccurate if not wrong. Therefore, any therapy, biological and/or psychological that is based on explicit responses is potentially misleading. With this opinion article we aim to generate awareness about potential discrepancies between self-reported versus objectively measured emotion-related states. There is more to emotion than just subjective feeling and we should start taking non-conscious emotion-related processes into account.