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Updated: Feb 27, 2026
The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content
Published on: June 29, 2016
An emotional Stroop task with faces and words. A comparison of young and older adults
Ana I Agustí1, Encarnación Satorres1, Alfonso Pitarque2
1Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia (Spain), Av. Blasco Ibañez 21, Valencia 46010, Spain.
Antecedents:
Given the contradictions of previous studies on the changes in attentional responses produced in aging a Stroop emotional task was proposed to compare young and older adults to words or faces with an emotional valence.
Method:
The words happy or sad were superimposed on faces that express the emotion of happiness or sadness. The emotion expressed by the word and the face could agree or not (cued and uncued trials, respectively). 85 young and 66 healthy older adults had to identify both faces and words separately, and the interference between the two types of stimuli was examined.
Results:
An interference effect was observed for both types of stimuli in both groups. There was more interference on positive faces and words than on negative stimuli.
Conclusions:
Older adults had more difficulty than younger in focusing on positive uncued trials, whereas there was no difference across samples on negative uncued trials.
