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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Published on: June 29, 2016
Childhood anxiety and attention to emotion faces in a modified stroop task
Julie A Hadwin1, Nick Donnelly, Anne Richards
1School of Psychology, Developmental Brain-Behaviour Laboratory, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK. jah7@soton.ac.uk
Abstract:
This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self-report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6-12 years. The results showed an interference of colour matching for angry (relative to neutral) faces in children with elevated SC. The same effect was not found for happy or control faces. In addition, the results suggest that selective attention to angry faces in children with social concern (SC) was not significantly moderated by age.
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