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The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Published on: June 29, 2016
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The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Moshe Shay Ben-Haim1, Paul Williams2, Zachary Howard2
1School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University; shay.mbh@gmail.com.
Journal of Visualized Experiments : Jove
|July 13, 2016
Summary
The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) reveals how emotional words slow color naming. This study highlights how stimulus order critically impacts ESE validity, showing only one order reliably produces the effect.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) measures cognitive interference from emotional stimuli.
- It's widely used in clinical and non-clinical populations to assess emotional processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To identify and control for threats to the validity of the ESE.
- To determine the optimal stimulus presentation order for reliable ESE measurement.
Main Methods:
- A modal experiment was designed to control for confounding factors.
- Investigated the impact of stimulus order (emotion vs. neutral words) on naming latencies.
Main Results:
- Repeated exposure to emotional stimuli can cause habituation, affecting validity.
- Only a specific order of stimulus presentation reliably elicits the ESE.
Conclusions:
- The order of stimulus presentation is crucial for valid ESE findings.
- Careful experimental design is necessary to mitigate threats to ESE validity.
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