I didn't mean to hurt you! Unconscious origins of experienced self-agency over others' emotions.

Our conscious experiences of self-agency tell us that we cause and change other people's emotions during social interactions, even without awareness of what we did. How do such experiences of being the cause of an outcome, such as the emotions of others, emerge? Previous authorship ascription research suggests that unconsciously primed knowledge about emotions produces a sense of self-agency upon seeing the primed emotions expressed in another agent. Taking into account the crucial role of valence and the nature of one's own actions in understanding others' behaviors, we predicted that preactivated knowledge linked to a particular emotion, in terms of action or valence, increases experienced self-agency upon seeing the emotion in another agent. In four experiments, participants interacted with another agent and observed this agent's neutral expressions change into emotional expressions. Results showed that various kinds of subliminal primes enhance experienced self-agency over the observed emotions. Our findings support the idea that the unconscious authorship ascription process is less rigid when outcomes are socially meaningful. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved