[A fair test of the spreading activation hypothesis: a study of affective congruency effects in the Stroop test]

It is argued that the Stroop color-naming task is especially suited to investigate affective priming effects in the sense of an automatic spreading of activation to other concepts of the same valence, because (a) the Stroop task is not prone to an explanation of affective congruency effects on the basis of reaction priming or reaction interference, and (b) it is possible to detect specific (fast and efficient stimulus processing due to heightened accessibility) as well as nonspecific (cognitive interference, triggering of global action tendencies) effects of an activation of valenced concepts in the Stroop task. Two experiments were conducted to investigate associative and affective priming effects with the Stroop task. In a first experiment (N = 36, SOA = 300 ms) a standard priming procedure was chosen; the primes were presented without any processing instructions. In a second experiment (N = 48, SOA = 500ms) the primes had to be reproduced after naming the color of the target. In both experiments significant association effects were found for the associative material. For the valenced material no affective congruency effects were found in either experiment. The present results are not compatible with the hypothesis of an automatic affective spreading of activation that was given as an explanation of affective congruency effects in previous studies using different tasks.