The unconscious has a long history in psychology. Although Freud is credited for his contributions on the understanding of the unconscious, contemporary psychology has failed to find evidence for much of Freud’s assertions concerning what the unconscious part of human beings contains. The unconscious is now considered to be indicative of automatic thought processes. Automatic thought is generally characterized as nonconscious processing. Automatic thought processes involve reflexive responses to certain triggering conditions. These processes require only that a stimulus event or object be detected by an individual’s sensory system. Once that triggering event is detected, the process runs to completion without awareness (for a review, see Wegner and Bargh 1998). Such nonconscious influences on thoughts can, in turn, automatically influence behavior. One frequently cited demonstration of this effect involved the priming of some participants with the concept of the elderly. Results...
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Randolph-Seng, B. (2014). Personal Unconscious. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_504
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