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The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Published on: June 29, 2016
Automatic processing of emotional words during an emotional Stroop task.
Ingmar H A Franken1, Liselotte Gootjes, Jan W van Strien
1Institute of Psychology, Erasmus Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. franken@fsw.eur.nl
Neuroreport
|April 17, 2009
Summary
Emotional words are processed automatically and rapidly, as shown by early event-related potential (ERP) components like the early posterior negativity (EPN). This suggests visual cortex areas play a role in automatic emotional processing.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Early event-related potential (ERP) components, particularly the early posterior negativity (EPN), are known to be influenced by emotional words.
- The automaticity of these early neural responses to emotional stimuli requires further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the automaticity of early event-related potential (ERP) responses to emotional words using an emotional Stroop task.
- To determine if the early posterior negativity (EPN) is modulated by the emotional connotation of words, indicating automatic processing.
Main Methods:
- An emotional Stroop task was employed to assess responses to emotional and neutral words.
- Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record event-related potentials (ERPs), focusing on the early posterior negativity (EPN), frontal P3, and late positive potential.
Main Results:
- The early posterior negativity (EPN) was significantly modulated by the emotional connotation of words.
- Emotional words also elicited an enhanced frontal P3 and a broadly distributed late positive potential.
- These findings indicate rapid and automatic processing of emotional word connotations.
Conclusions:
- The early event-related potential (ERP) activity, specifically the EPN, reflects the fast and automatic processing of emotional word connotations.
- The posterior visual association cortex appears to play a role in the automatic processing of emotional information.
- These findings contribute to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying emotional word processing.
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