ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cultural Psychology
The Silent Influence: Experimental Validation of Cultural Unconscious and Its Psychological Impact through Chinese Archetypal Imagery
Provisionally accepted
- 1Guangdong University of Finance & Economics, Guangzhou, China
- 2City University of Macau, Taipa, Macao, SAR China
- 3South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
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This paper empirically confirms Henderson's theory of cultural unconscious which is a psychic layer mediating between collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. We particularly tested the effect of high-valence Chinese archetypal imagery on cognition. A multi-method experimental design was applied to three studies to demonstrate unconscious activation: 1) Reaction Time task proved faster cognitive processing to the exemplary archetypal images than the nonrepresentative ones (study1); 2) Supraliminal Priming followed by a situational choice task proved that there was a significant, unconscious bias of behavioral choices that followed the symbolic meanings of the images (study2); 3) Rigorous Subliminal Priming demonstrated that cultural unconscious could be activated to influence semantic alignment in a word-choice task, even outside of conscious awareness (study3). These data provide solid, quantitative proof that the cultural unconscious is an operatively effective psychological structure, bridging depth psychology concepts with contemporary cognitive science. Keywords: cultural unconscious, Chinese cultural archetypal imagery, empirical study, unconscious influence
Keywords: Cultural unconscious, Chinese cultural archetypal imagery, Empirical study, Unconscious influence, Archetypes and Behavior
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 28 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Shen, Zhang and Wen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xin Zhang, zhangscutedu@163.com
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