Subliminal phobic stimuli have been used since decades to investigate the role of consciousness in emotions' surge and regulation. The present study used an augmented reality setting to show neutral (deers, birds), generically-fearful (bears) or phobic (spiders) stimuli to 50 more-or-less spiderfearful participants while registering their electroencephalographic, electrocardiographic and electrodermal correlates. Importantly, each stimulus was followed by a trial-by-trial check of its detection, allowing to distinguish perceptually-subliminal stimuli (i.e., what is usually intended as "subliminal") from emotionally-subliminal ones (i.e., stimuli that fail to elicit the expected emotion even if correctly detected).Coherently with our systematic reviews of the literature on subliminal stimuli, we found that 1) perceptually-subliminal phobic stimuli induced electrodermal responses significantly different from those to neutral stimuli; 2) the detectability of very-brief (17 ms) phobic stimuli significantly increased at the increase of phobia, but for the majority of participants these stimuli were emotionally-subliminal; 3) the electrodermal responses to phobic stimuli underwent habituation; 4) the emotionally-subliminal stimuli (correctly detected, but not feared) produced an electrodermal response weaker than the perceptually-subliminal ones (not detected at all), possibly as a result of a cortical inhibition elicited more by barely-conscious than by totally-unconscious stimuli (as suggested by the respective EEG correlates).All these results stress the relevance of consciousness in piloting emotional regulation and in integrating physiological correlates (e.g., electrodermal response) with the pertinent subjective experience (e.g., "I feel fear").The theoretical implications and clinical applications of these results can significantly impact the way we approach phobias, emotion regulation, and exposure therapies.