The emotional counting Stroop: a task for assessing emotional interference during brain imaging.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychophysiology

Background:

• The emotional Stroop task is a variant of the traditional Stroop task, adapted for neuroimaging.
• It uses motor responses (button presses) instead of spoken responses to minimize head movement during fMRI.
• Emotional stimuli can elicit interference effects, impacting cognitive processing and reaction times.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe and validate the emotional counting Stroop (ecStroop) task for use in fMRI studies.
• To demonstrate that the ecStroop task produces measurable reaction time-interference effects.
• To present a protocol amenable to various emotional word lists, including general negative and trauma-specific words.

Main Methods:

• Subjects perform a button-press response indicating the number of words presented, ignoring word meaning.
• Interference trials use emotional words (e.g., trauma-related), while control trials use neutral words.
• Reaction times are measured to assess interference effects.

Main Results:

• The ecStroop task is designed to produce reaction time-interference effects similar to the traditional emotional Stroop.
• Interference is expected to be observed in specific psychopathological groups and in non-clinical subjects for personally relevant words.
• The protocol is efficient, completable in approximately 20 minutes per subject.

Conclusions:

• The described ecStroop task is a viable and efficient tool for investigating emotional processing in cognitive neuroscience.
• It offers a method to study emotional interference effects using fMRI, adaptable to diverse research questions and populations.
• The task's design minimizes motion artifacts, crucial for high-quality fMRI data acquisition.