<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px;">'An experiment by British researchers has found that even though subliminal messages are shown so briefly that the human eye cannot consciously read them, the brain is particularly good at picking up on the emotional meaning of a word if it is negative.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px;">Scientists at University College London believe the results of the study, in which participants correctly identified when a subliminally transmitted word had negative connotations more than seven times out of 10, shows that humans are programmed at a sub-conscious level to respond to any stimulus that contains a potential threat...</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px;">Volunteers were shown a series of positive, negative and neutral words, such as "cheerful", "despair" or "box", for as little as 17 milliseconds – far too quick for the mind to perceive conventionally – and asked to decide whether or not each word had an emotional value.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px;">Where the volunteers correctly identified a word as emotional – for example "flower", "peace", "agony" or "murder" – they were more efficient at picking out those with a negative meaning. In one test, where participants were shown each word for just 33 milliseconds, negative words were correctly spotted 77 per cent of the time, as opposed to 59 per cent for positive terms.'</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px;">Full story at <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/power-of-the-hidden-message-revealed-1794256.html" target="_blank">The Independent</a>, via <a href="http://anomalist.com/">The Anomalist</a></p>