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Abstract
This article provides an appraisal of the claims of subliminal effects that are alleged to result from commercially available subliminal auditory tapes. Research is described whose purpose was to empirically investigate whether the tapes in question are capable - in principle - of initiating the perceptual activities that are a necessary and logical prerequisite for higher order processes implicated in therapeutic benefits.
Fifty - three subjects listened to pairs of subliminal tapes which contained ostensibly different subliminal messages, but which were otherwise identical. Participants were required to distinguish one tape from the other. After 400 trials on a forced - choice discrimination task, subjects' performance was indistinguishable from chance. These data indicate that the tapes tested do not appear to meet the minimum condition necessary for demonstrating subliminal perception, thereby obviating any possible therapeutic consequences.
In September of 1957 legal and ethical concerns were expressed regarding allegations that movie audiences were being surreptitiously controlled by invisible messages exhorting them to "Drink Coca - Cola" and "Eat popcorn". According to the New Yorker, minds had been "broken and entered" (Moore, 1982). More than three decades later, claims of covert subliminal manipulation persist. Television commercials, magazine ads, and book stores promote subliminal tapes that promise to induce dramatic improvements in mental and psychological health. These devices are widely advertised as being able to produce many desirable effects, including weight loss, memory enhancement, and improvement of sexual function.
Reviewers have been skeptical that subliminal self - help audio tapes have any genuine utility for enhancing human performance (Eich & Hyman, 1991; The British Psychological Society, 1992). Merikle and Skanes (1992) conducted an empirical evaluation of subliminal weight loss tapes and found no evidence that the tapes were effective in modifying behaviour. Other studies have obtained similar results (Greenwald, 1992b; Greenwald, Spangenberg, Pratkanis, & Eskenazi, 1991). The study to be described here suggests that there could never be any therapeutic benefits from such devices because they do not appear to contain a signal that is capable of triggering any perceptual activity - conscious or otherwise.
Moore (1991; 1992b) suggested that there is a chain of effects assumed to result from subliminal auditory tapes (see Figure 1).
This model assumes that success at any particular stage in the sequence...