A-109 Anxiety Influences Traumatic Brain Injury Survivors and Healthy Comparison Adult Bilinguals Stroop Color Word Test Performance

Abstract

Abstract Objective We evaluated symptoms of anxiety (via the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale; HADS, HADS-A) on Stroop Color Word Test (SCWT) performances in traumatic brain injury (TBI) survivors, as compared to healthy comparison participants (HC). Method The sample consisted of 40 acute TBI survivors [ATBI; 30 normal symptoms of anxiety (NSA); 10 abnormal symptoms of anxiety (ASA)], 30 chronic TBI survivors (CTBI; 16 NSA; 14 ASA), and 50 HC’s (28 NSA; 22 ASA). All participants passed performance validity testing. The SCWT included the word (SCWT-W), color (SCWT-C), and color-word (SCWT-CW) conditions. A series of ANOVAs were used to evaluate SCWT performances. Results ANOVA revealed a main effect group on the SCWT-C, p = .011, and SCWT-CW, p = .018, with HC’s outperforming the ATBI group. Furthermore, HC outperformed both TBI groups on the SCWT-W, p = .004. We also found that the ASA outperformed the NSA group on the SCWT-W, p = .036. No interactions emerged between group and anxiety. Conclusion The HC group outperformed both TBI groups on the SCWT-W, but only the ATBI group on SCWT-C and SCWT-CW. Furthermore, we found that there were only differences between the anxiety groups on the SCWT-W. Our findings highlight that anxiety impacts HC and TBI groups differently on the SCWT.