Direct measures of conscious emotion are not available, so assessment of animal affect has relied on measures of the behavioural and physiological components of affective states.
These results are consistent with the view that eye-of-origin information involves monocular cells within primary visual cortex that typically exhibit a poor correlation with measures of conscious awareness [33].
A valid measure of conscious experience is thus participants' ability to report or detect stimuli, and importantly, investigations should include both subjective and objective measures of conscious reportability [11], [12].
Results from these studies raise some problems of interpretation, however, because there were no online measures of conscious experience taken during scanning and it is therefore possible that the observed DMN activations are due to factors other than mind-wandering [9], [10].
To test if there is an impact of emotion on conscious experience we used a masking paradigm similar to that used by Dehaene et al. [20], but in contrast to Dehaene et al., we used both subjective confidence and objective accuracy measures of conscious reportability.
Whilst direct measures of conscious emotion are not available, behavioural and physiological components of affective states can be assessed by, for example, open field, elevated plus maze [1 4] and forced swim tests [3,5], vocalizations [1], facial expressions, and stress physiology readouts [3].
