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2010 Vol. 74(1) 99-115

Editor:
John A. Palmer, Ph.D.
Copyright: 
Parapsychology Press

Citation

Parker, A. and Sjödén, B. (2010). Article. Do Some of Us Habituate to Future Emotional Events? Journal of Parapsychology, 74(1), 99-115.

Article

Do Some of Us Habituate to Future Emotional Events?

Adrian Parker and Björn Sjödén

From an evolutionary perspective, it may be advantageous not only to unconsciously react to emotionally threatening stimuli but also to habituate to these if they should prove harmless. A major purpose of the study was to test for the occurrence of this precognitive affective habituation at a subliminal level using emotionally loaded pictures. The design chosen here enabled us to evaluate whether or not participants habituated to emotionally loaded pictures and to see if they reacted selectively to just those target pictures that would later be repeatedly exposed, thus becoming potentially less threatening. It was further hypothesized that both the subliminal and the precognitive effects would relate to individual measures of emotional reactivity and transliminality. Fifty participants took part in the two successive computer steered procedures in order to respectively evaluate these aspects. A significant habituation effect was found for the negatively loaded targets. The overall findings failed to show a significant discrimination between those pictures than would be re- presented and those that were not. However, by selecting out the 34 individuals who showed affective habituation, a post hoc significant effect of precognitive habitation was found.

Keywords:

precognition, psi, subliminal, affective habituation, emotional

reactivity

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