Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Unconscious influence'

Past research has examined the many ways individuals behave in response to unconscious primes. For instance, unconsciously activating stereotypes leads people to exhibit behavior that parallels the target stereotype (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). Priming methodology has also been extended to inducing mortality salience, such that specific behaviors emerge in response to thinking about one’s own death. Two theories, socioemotional selectivity theory and terror management theory, hypothesize how individuals cope with thoughts about the end of life. The present study attempted to extend past research by comparing older and younger adults’ responses to unconscious mortality salience. Fifty-nine younger adults and 52 older adults were randomly assigned to one of two prime conditions: death prime or negative prime. The unconscious primes were administered through word searches, which contained 20 target words related to each prime. Defenses to the primes were assessed via suitability ratings and reaction times to a picture-caption task, which contained both neutral and emotional (positive and negative) captions paired with neutral pictures. A defense was operationalized as higher suitability ratings and faster reaction times to the positive captions, as well as lower suitability ratings and slower reaction times to the negative captions. Based on terror management theory, it was expected that individuals who were primed with death would display specific defensive behavioral responses as compared to those who were primed with negativity, regardless of age. Socioemotional selectivity theory, however, predicts that these defenses may also emerge when older adults are primed with negativity due to the increased tendency for older adults, relative to younger adults, to automatically implement default emotion regulatory goals. Analyses revealed that both younger and older adults embraced the neutral and positive captions after being primed with death. Participants primed with negativity were also more likely to embrace positivity. Age differences emerged such that younger adults were faster when reacting to emotional captions in the death condition than in the negative condition. Conversely, older adults primed with negativity reacted faster to emotional captions than those primed with death. Implications for terror management theory and socioemotional selectivity theory are discussed. Overall, both young and older adults displayed defenses to prime-activated threats of death and negativity. The implementation of death-related defenses was stronger for younger adults than the implementation of negativity-related defenses, but the opposite was true for older adults.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 102-110).
Our sense of smell is perhaps the most pervasive of all senses, as it has the ability to evoke memories and emotions in a vivid and subtle manner. While olfactory communication is one of the most basic methods of communication, it is also one of the least understood and one of the least exploited in human computer interaction. In this thesis we describe the hidden power of scent along with the design and implementation of "Essence", a custom made olfactory wearable device and its stationary version. Essence is a necklace that can be used by any person in their daily life for the purpose of altering one's mood, as well as affecting cognitive and psychological conditions. It can influence the user's behavior through consciously perceivable as well as subliminal bursts of scent released while the person is asleep or awake. The device can be remotely controlled through a smartphone and can vary the intensity and frequency of the released scent. The system can also potentially be triggered by physiological data such as brain signals, heart rate, or galvanic skin response, etc. The types of scent that can be placed in the necklace can range from essential oils to odorless scents like hormones and pheromones. We conducted a set of preliminary studies that show an overall satisfaction, comfort and ease of use of the system. We also demonstrate the effectiveness for mood enhancing and cognitive performance during wakefulness and sleep state.
by Judith Amores Fernandez.
S.M.

Personality measures were predicted to be susceptible to response distortion above and beyond volitional strategies of impression management. A 2 (Instruction Set) x 2 (Personality Feedback) x 2 (Mortality Salience) factorial design addressed social desirability biases in responding to personality measures. There were significant changes in all measures due to volitional (Fake Good) strategies. Thoughts of death lead to decreased distortion, but only on the measures sensitive to social desirability bias. Mortality Salience interacted with personality feedback, such that test responses were distorted in the opposite direction of the feedback, supporting Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. A significant interaction between Mortality Salience and Instruction Set suggests further attention be given to unconscious distortion in personality scores and that Terror Management Theory incorporate further research on individual differences.
Master of Science

In the response priming paradigm, a small briefly presented visual stimulus (i.e., prime) is followed by a larger visible stimulus (i.e., mask) that renders the prime invisible and specifies the target location. According to the rapid-chase theory, the initial portion of the movement is dictated by the prime (initiation criterion) while the later portion is dictated by the mask (takeover criterion) and the prime is initially processed independently from the mask (independence criterion). The purpose of the first experiment was to determine if the processing of the prime and mask fit the predictions of the rapid-chase theory when the prime and mask are presented during an ongoing movement. The second experiment was designed to examine the impact of the prime when it is presented at various times throughout the execution of the movement. Participants initiated rapid pointing movements to a center target. On 1/3 of the trials, participants had to correct their movements to the left (or right) target in response to a left-pointing (or right-pointing) mask arrow, which was preceded by a neutral, left-, or right-pointing prime arrow. In Experiment 1, the prime was presented at movement onset and the mask randomly appeared 33, 50, or 67 ms after prime onset. In Experiment 2, the prime followed movement onset with a delay of 17, 33, or 50 ms and the mask was presented 50 ms after prime onset. In both experiments, participants first modified their movements in the direction indicated by the prime before completing their movements to the correct target in the majority of trials; thus, supporting the initiation and takeover criteria. However, the spatial priming effects did not follow the time course predicted by the independence criterion. Overall, the rapid-chase theory does not seem to apply to movement execution, but the prime is still able to influence the movement despite being presented later in the pointing trajectory.

This thesis identifies and explores a ‘return to Freud’ in the work of Jacques Derrida. Resemblances between Derrida’s method of deconstruction and the therapeutic procedure of psychoanalysis have long been a source of debate among critics. Is deconstruction little more than a psychoanalytic reading of the history of philosophy, or is Freud a Derridean avant la lettre? Revealing this dilemma to be a false one, this thesis challenges major interpreters of Derrida such as Jonathan Culler and Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak. By developing Derrida’s well-known yet little understood concept of différance, it argues that this dilemma stems from an inadequate understanding of Derrida’s treatment of time. The structure of temporality implied by différance entails that the meaning of the past is continually reconstituted in its relationship to an ever-evolving present. Far from dissolving the importance of Freud’s contribution, this structure allows Derrida to circumvent nebulous notions of ‘influence’ and ‘indebtedness’ while still engaging psychoanalysis as a key theoretical resource in his own project of deconstruction. A productive engagement with psychoanalytic theory is shown to inform every major stage of the philosopher’s career, from his early phenomenological work to his later reflections on the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Derrida repeatedly turns to Freud as a crucial interlocutor in interrogating a number of philosophical problems encountered in his own work. These problems include the nature of time, space, and memory; the role of the fictive in scientific discourse; the question of the archive; the interdependence of the psyche and technology; and the relationship between politics and the unconscious. At a theoretical level, this thesis provides a detailed account of Derrida’s notion of spacing, arguing that the unconditional belatedness entailed by différance calls us to a difficult, dual responsibility: both towards the legator of an inheritance (that is, towards the textual legacy Freud has bequeathed to us) and towards the unforeseeable future contexts in which this inheritance will require transformation. The discourse of deconstruction, it concludes, enacts a careful negotiation of these two demands.

Les questions de changement d’attitude et de comportement sont au cœur de nombreuses recherches en communication. Depuis quelques années, dans les contextes de la communication commerciale ou d’utilité sociétale, hors ligne, des chercheurs utilisent le paradigme de la communication engageante dans un but souvent scientifique, parfois interventionnel. Si ces travaux ont permis de mieux comprendre les effets de la communication engageante sur le comportement effectif et les attitudes, peu de recherches ont étudié la réception et l'effet de la communication engageante dans un environnement numérique. Mobilisant une méthodologie mixte (qualitative et expérimentale), dans un but essentiellement explicatif, notre recherche, pluridisciplinaire, étudie les effets de la communication engageante, associée à la théorie de l’identification de l'action, ainsi que les processus psychosociaux impliqués dans la réception et les effets
Attitude and behavior change issues lie at the heart of much communication research. In recent years, in the context of commercial communication or communication for societal utility services, offline, researchers have been using the paradigm of binding communication often for scientific purposes, sometimes for the purposes of intervention. While these researches have led to a better understanding of the effects of binding communication on actual behavior and attitudes, little research has examined the reception and effect of binding communication in a digital environment. Using a mixed methodology (qualitative and experimental), with an essentially explanatory aim, our multidisciplinary research studies the effects of binding communication, associated with the theory of identification of action, as well as the psychosocial processes involved in reception and effects

Previous research has examined a variety of behavioural effects, thought to stem from mental exhaustion, following the prior use of inhibitory control. Here we attempt to examine whether such effects are apparent in unconscious behaviours. Chapter 1 demonstrates no effect of prior use of inhibitory control on subsequent susceptibility to subliminal priming of neutral (Experiment 1) and reward (Experiment 2) terms. Chapter 2 explores whether the prior use of inhibitory control influences the degree of susceptibility to an alternative source of influence, hypnotic induction, and provides the novel finding that inhibitory impairment does not affect hypnotic response. Chapter 3 utilises behavioural and fMRI imaging data to examine changes in a conscious facet of human experience often moderated by unconscious influences: emotion regulation. The results support a period of increased mood lability following a challenging inhibitory control task. However, we were unable to provide evidence of any underlying change in cortical activation and connectivity. Finally, Chapter 4 investigates whether this heightened mood lability following prior inhibitory control would also be mirrored in ratings of emotion attributed to positive and negatively valenced images (Experiment 1) and additionally, whether a mindfulness induction, previously documented to improve emotion regulation, would reduce individuals' perception of the degree of valence attributed to the same images (Experiment 2). Contrary to predictions, we report substantial evidence for no effect of prior inhibitory control or a brief mindfulness manipulation on subsequent ratings of emotionally valenced stimuli. Taken together the research indicates that mental exhaustion arising from the use of self-control appears to have no effect on susceptibility to unconscious priming, hypnotic suggestions, and no effect on the perception of emotionally valenced images. However, prior use of inhibitory control does appear to affect the degree of emotional lability experienced following music.

Discussions about consciousness are complicated by the fact that participants do not share a common underlying “ordinary” consciousness. Everyday experience is founded on what Teasdale calls implicational cognition, much of which is not verbally formulated. An unacknowledged aspect of debate is individuals’ attempts to negotiate the expression of their unformulated experience. This is further complicated by the way in which a discourse, based on particular ontological assumptions, exercises an ideological control which limits what underlying aspects of experience can be formulated at all. Tart’s concept of state specific sciences provides a framework within which the role of unformulated experience can be acknowledged and taken into account. Unless this is done, debates will be vitiated by participants engaging in ideological struggles and talking at cross-purposes.

How do people make decisions in uncertain environments and what types of knowl- edge control their choices? Can our decisions be guided by unconscious influences or intuitive “gut” feelings? According to the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, a popular account of the role of affect in decision-making, emotion-based signals can guide our decisions in uncertain environments outside awareness. However, evidence for this claim can be ques- tioned on the grounds of inadequate and insensitive assessments of conscious knowledge. In this work, variations of a classic experience-based decision-making paradigm, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), are employed in combination with subjective measures of awareness in order to investigate the role played by unconscious influences. Specifically, the validity of post-decision wagering as a sensitive and bias-free measure of conscious content is examined and contrasted to confidence ratings and quantitative reports. The results demonstrate the inadequacy of post-decision wagering as a direct measure of conscious knowledge and also question the claim that implicit processes influence decision- making. In order to measure and understand the cognitive and psychological processes un- derlying performance on the IGT, computational modeling analyses are undertaken to provide deeper insights into the dynamics of decision-making. Reinforcement-learning models are evaluated using different model comparison techniques and a computational model of confidence ratings in decision-making under uncertainty is developed.

Figure-ground perception can be modeled as a competitive process with mutual inhibition between shape properties on opposite sides of an edge. This dissertation reports brain-based evidence that such competitive inhibition can be induced by access to preexisting object memory representations during figure assignment. Silhouette stimuli were used in which the balance of properties along an edge biased the inner, bounded, region to be seen as a novel figure. Experimental silhouettes (EXP) suggested familiar objects on their outside edges, which nonetheless appeared as shapeless grounds. Control silhouettes (CON) suggested novel shapes on the outside.In an initial task, human observers categorized masked EXP and CON silhouettes (175 ms exposure) as "novel" versus a third group of silhouettes depicting "familiar" objects on the inside. Signal detection measures verified that observers were unconscious of the familiar shapes within the EXP stimuli. Across three experiments, novel categorizations were highly accurate with shorter RTs for EXP than CON. Event-related potential (ERP) indices of observers' brain activity (Experiments 2 and 3) revealed a Late Potential (~300 ms) to be less positive for EXP than CON, a reduction in neural activity consistent with the presence of greater competitive inhibition for EXP stimuli. After controlling for stimulus confounds (Experiment 3), the P1 ERP (~100 ms) was larger for EXP than CON conditions, perhaps reflecting unconscious access to object memories.In a second task, observers were informed about familiar shapes suggested on the outsides of the EXP silhouettes before viewing masked (Experiments 1 and 2) or unmasked (Experiment 3) EXP and CON silhouettes to report whether they saw familiar shapes on the outside. Experiment 3 observers were more accurate to categorize CON vs. EXP stimuli as novel vs. familiar, with shorter RTs for EXP than CON. Task 2 N170 ERPs (~170 ms) were larger for EXP than CON in Experiments 2 and 3, reflecting the conscious perception of familiar shape in the outsides of EXP silhouettes. LP magnitudes were greater for CON than EXP, although ERP polarity was dependent on the presence/absence of a mask. Task 2 LPs may reflect competitive inhibition or longer processing times for CON stimuli.

The proof set forward in this thesis is that the method of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), which he came in the 1970’s to describe as ‘structuralist’, ‘phenomenological’ and even ‘metaphysical’, owes a heretofore unacknowledged debt to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Critics have thus far neglected the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century psychology in McLuhan’s work, although a wealth of biographical material supports the argument that McLuhan’s ‘metaphysical’ method is derived as much from psychoanalysis and analytical psychology (C.G. Jung) as from any of McLuhan’s acknowledged predecessors. Returning to the texts from which McLuhan gained his knowledge of psychology, I trace the influence of Freud, Jung and their disciples upon McLuhan, establishing McLuhan’s use of Freudian concepts and terminology in his first book The Mechanical Bride (1951), and his use of the psychoanalytic concepts of the ‘unconscious’, ‘trauma’ and ‘repression’ in the books that came after it. What McLuhan calls the ‘unconscious’ is more often named by him as Logos, ‘acoustic space’ or the ‘media environment’, and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth. Despite his rejection of the Freudian argument, McLuhan, like Freud, conceptualizes pain or trauma as the ‘cause’ of transformations (i.e. processes) in the unconscious; but while for McLuhan, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, technologies are ‘formal causes’ simultaneous with (or ‘preceded’ by) their effects, for Freud and his modern interpreter Jacques Lacan, trauma is ‘paradoxical’ in structure, presenting as both its own ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Situating McLuhan in relation to French structuralism, I contrast McLuhan’s concepts of ‘figure’ (as cause) and ‘ground’ (as effects), elaborated in his last book Laws of Media (1988), to the concepts of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), and critique McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’, the ideograph with which he illustrates media ‘effects’, in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the signifier elaborated by Lacan. In reply to McLuhan’s maxim that ‘the medium is the message’, I conclude that technologies, insofar as they function as ‘formal causes’, are doubly ‘hidden’: firstly, because, as McLuhan says, they can only be grasped through their effects; and secondly because, as Lacan says, their effects can only be articulated when they manifest as ‘disturbances’ in the symbolic order, i.e., as fantasies of the Other’s jouissance (enjoyment). There are numerous stories about how McLuhan would frustrate his critics by refusing to take a ‘point-of-view’, and in fact his (psychoanalytic) technique of ‘putting on’ the audience as a mask, and his (deconstructivist) manner of changing perspectives as often as necessary, sit oddly with his championing of Logos. A comparison with Freud and Lacan finds McLuhan at a ‘paradoxical’ moment in the history of Western thought, poised between modernism and postmodernism, between structuralism and deconstructivism, and between metaphysics and psychoanalysis.
Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008

The proof set forward in this thesis is that the method of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), which he came in the 1970’s to describe as ‘structuralist’, ‘phenomenological’ and even ‘metaphysical’, owes a heretofore unacknowledged debt to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Critics have thus far neglected the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century psychology in McLuhan’s work, although a wealth of biographical material supports the argument that McLuhan’s ‘metaphysical’ method is derived as much from psychoanalysis and analytical psychology (C.G. Jung) as from any of McLuhan’s acknowledged predecessors. Returning to the texts from which McLuhan gained his knowledge of psychology, I trace the influence of Freud, Jung and their disciples upon McLuhan, establishing McLuhan’s use of Freudian concepts and terminology in his first book The Mechanical Bride (1951), and his use of the psychoanalytic concepts of the ‘unconscious’, ‘trauma’ and ‘repression’ in the books that came after it. What McLuhan calls the ‘unconscious’ is more often named by him as Logos, ‘acoustic space’ or the ‘media environment’, and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth. Despite his rejection of the Freudian argument, McLuhan, like Freud, conceptualizes pain or trauma as the ‘cause’ of transformations (i.e. processes) in the unconscious; but while for McLuhan, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, technologies are ‘formal causes’ simultaneous with (or ‘preceded’ by) their effects, for Freud and his modern interpreter Jacques Lacan, trauma is ‘paradoxical’ in structure, presenting as both its own ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Situating McLuhan in relation to French structuralism, I contrast McLuhan’s concepts of ‘figure’ (as cause) and ‘ground’ (as effects), elaborated in his last book Laws of Media (1988), to the concepts of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), and critique McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’, the ideograph with which he illustrates media ‘effects’, in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the signifier elaborated by Lacan. In reply to McLuhan’s maxim that ‘the medium is the message’, I conclude that technologies, insofar as they function as ‘formal causes’, are doubly ‘hidden’: firstly, because, as McLuhan says, they can only be grasped through their effects; and secondly because, as Lacan says, their effects can only be articulated when they manifest as ‘disturbances’ in the symbolic order, i.e., as fantasies of the Other’s jouissance (enjoyment). There are numerous stories about how McLuhan would frustrate his critics by refusing to take a ‘point-of-view’, and in fact his (psychoanalytic) technique of ‘putting on’ the audience as a mask, and his (deconstructivist) manner of changing perspectives as often as necessary, sit oddly with his championing of Logos. A comparison with Freud and Lacan finds McLuhan at a ‘paradoxical’ moment in the history of Western thought, poised between modernism and postmodernism, between structuralism and deconstructivism, and between metaphysics and psychoanalysis.
Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008

This study originated in the phenomenon that has been observed in the South African Saddle Horse Industry of substantial investments being made over time in the absence of obvious financial or economic reward. A literature study confirmed that, internationally, investment without obvious financial and economic rewards is not unknown and at the same time it was obvious that it is a rarely studied subject. From the literature study it was also evident that this phenomenon occurs where passion and, to a lesser extent, commitment is involved. Economic models on decision making is lacking in perspective on the influence of emotions which were proven to be substantial in an emotionally-laden market, such as the South African Saddle Horse industry. Consumption theory in marketing describes consumption decisions where the consumer is so influenced by emotions that rational influences barely come into play. It is in this context that the study seeks to qualify the investment decisions in the South African Saddle Horse industry by the adaption of consumption theory to investment theory. Research on the indicated strategic phenomenon fits within the critical realism paradigm and is essentially inductive, theory building research. In this case, the adaption of consumer theory as investment theory. Qualifying the influence of emotions in the investment decision – the “why” and “how” questions about a contemporary set of events, over which the researcher has no control – indicates case study as the applicable method of research. In this research, the case study theory is built by generalising case data to prior theory seeking replication or theoretical replication. With prior theory embracing the mentioned consumer theory and case selection dictated by the information, a case study can assist to identify the motivators of the investment decision. Once qualified, the influence of emotions on the investment decision in the mentioned strategic phenomenon can be quantified. Quantifying the influence of emotions on the investment decision leaves two alternatives, the first of which is developing a data set in a statistical survey. However, neuroeconomic findings indicate that opportunity cost comparisons for decisions are supported by our emotional circuitry that is commonly below our conscious awareness. This finding has the direct implication that opportunity cost questions in retrospect do not yield reliable information. The second alternative would be to use dependable historic investment decision data series, such as auction prices. But in the South African Saddle Horse industry, only African Saddle Horse Futurity (ASF) offers any usable investment decision data series, with the AACup being the mother competition in the USA, offering a compatible data series but much more complete and evolved. Therefore, in quantifying the influence of emotions on investment decisions, ASF data and extended AACup auction data is used in an Ordinary Least Squares regression (OLS) analysis and for further calculations. In the literature study it was evident that emotions will be a major influence in investment decisions in the horse industry. This was confirmed by the multiple case study, proving applicability of consumption theory to the investment decision in the South African Saddle Horse industry. The OLS analysis rendered the magnitude of influence of emotions on the investment decision as both prohibitive and irregular on the theoretical determinants of the investment decisions. In all the research done, emotions were unanimously proven to be the determining influence on the investment decision in the South African Saddle Horse industry. But in a free market system where price equates demand and supply, the confirmed influence of emotions in the establishment of price hampers the effective distribution of scarce production resources. In this, the influence of emotions results in a cost to the industry. By manipulating the data set used in the dissertation, an indication of the historic cost of the influence of emotions in the investment decision at the ASF and AACup competitions became apparent. Also, the influence of emotions can be equally crucial in, for example, exploiting economic growth potential. For example, the Saddle Horse industry is a world-wide multimillion dollar industry, with coincidently proven and strong connections with good growth potential to South Africa’s rural areas. These connections contain sustainable development potential to improve the quality of life for many people living in these rural areas. But in order to successfully exploit this potential, more information on emotions as an economic variable is needed in stimulating the industry. In accordance with the incidence of emotions as an influence in decision making, evident in literature and this research, this argument for more information is extendable to numerous other emotionally influenced markets. Therefore, in order to improve reliability of predictions on economic investment and also economic growth, emotions as an influence have to be accounted for.
MSc (Agric), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

碩士
中原大學
心理學研究所
98
Abstract According to the unconscious thought theory (Dijksterhuis & Norgren, 2006), a period of distraction can elicit unconscious thought. It has been demonstrated that participants whose attention was distracted from complex problems made better choices, decisions and judgments than participants who focused their attention on the problem. Such findings demonstrate the benefit of unconscious thinking. However, this effect appears to be not stable. Several groups of researchers reported the failure of replicating this phenomenon. Some factors may be responsible for these conflict results. This paper examined the influence of cognitive resource on conscious thought. Experiment 1 investigated the relationship between working memory span and the performance of conscious and unconscious thinking. Experiment 2 examined the impact of working memory load on the performance of conscious and unconscious thinking. The results demonstrated the important role of cognitive resource.

A useful paradigm for investigating unconscious influences on performance derives from the study of explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) memory, however direct and indirect tests used to measure these constructs are seldom process pure, and it is problematic to make firm conclusions about unconscious influences on the basis of these tests alone. Consequently, various methodologies for separating out the respective influence of unconscious processes have been devised. Two experiments are reported which employed a levels of processing (LOP) approach to manipulate encoding level at study and a unique method for accessing the effect of unconscious influences on direct test performance by analysing the correctness of responses reported as "guessed." Experiment 1 (n = 12) employed a direct (cued recall) test and was a preliminary attempt to establish the validity of the "analysis of guessing" methodology. Experiment 2 (n =36) employed comparable direct (cued recall) and indirect (stem completion) tests and investigated unconscious influences in a more rigorous manner by obtaining confidence ratings of recollection on a 5-point scale and accepting only zero ratings as reliably guessed. Analysis of correctly guessed responses showed that guessing stems of nonsemantically processed words enhanced direct test performance whereas guessing stems of semantically processed words had no affect on performance. Results are discussed in terms of subjects' unwitting resourcefulness at being able to "retrieve" words they cannot explicitly remember, and the advantage offered by the analysis of guessing methodology over and above alternate methods for measuring unconscious influences.