A team of researchers at University College London showed volunteers a series of words with positive, negative, and neutral connotations. Each word was shown too quickly for the viewer to consciously perceive it, but the researchers asked the viewers to identify whether the word had an emotional value. Viewers correctly identified negative words as having an emotional value 77 percent of the time, while they correctly identified positive words as having an emotional value just 59 percent of the time.

The researchers believe that this superior subliminal perception of negative words is tied to a primal tendency to be more alert to threats than to non-threats. Thus, words that create a sense of fear or anxiety are more acutely perceived by the human brain and are more likely to trigger an emotional response. That suggests that, if advertisers are looking to utilize subliminal messages, it's less effective to tout your product's virtues than it is to bash the competition.

Power of the hidden message revealed [The Independent]

New Scientist reports that a new Northwestern University study has demonstrated that the decision-making areas of the brain can actually be affected by images that we don't even consciously remember seeing:

Joel Voss of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues showed volunteers 12 kaleidoscope images for 2 seconds each while they also performed an unrelated number task to distract them from consciously committing the images to memory. A minute later, volunteers were asked to look at pairs of similar-looking images and choose the one they had seen before. They were also asked whether they were sure, had "a feeling" they were right, or were just guessing. Those who took a shot in the dark were as successful as the rest. "They were 70 to 80 per cent accurate; it would be only 50 per cent if it was chance," says Voss.

Suddenly, it's time to worry if those images in Fringe that appear before the commercial breaks are doing something to our brains.

Subliminal messages really do affect your decisions [New Scientist]