From neuropod podcast, September 2010, discusses research on processing emotions without being aware of it.

Click to listen to podcast and fast forward, if you want, to 18:39.

Driving a car is not a conscious exercise. The perceptions we’re picking up, consciously and subconsciously, continuously, are far too many to process consciously. Emotion, literally, motivate actions like getting out of bed. In the podcast the author endorses the idea that we (scientists, and the general population) overweight the significance of our conscious decisions and actions in daily life.

One example they talk about is visual perceptions. Not all the visual information goes to the visual cortex to be processed. The are other pathways, that go directly to emotional, older, closer to brain stem, more “animal” parts of our brain.

Here is the abstract from the Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, “Neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals” by Marco Tamietto & Beatrice de Gelder:

Many emotional stimuli are processed without being consciously perceived. Recent evidence indicates that subcortical structures have a substantial role in this processing. These structures are part of a phylogenetically ancient pathway that has specific functional properties and that interacts with cortical processes. There is now increasing evidence that non-consciously perceived emotional stimuli induce distinct neurophysiological changes and influence behaviour towards the consciously perceived world. Understanding the neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals will clarify the phylogenetic continuity of emotion systems across species and the integration of cortical and subcortical activity in the human brain.