Abstract
Prior research has found significant emotional Stroop effects for negative stimuli, but the results have been inconsistent for positive stimuli. Combining an evolutionary perspective of emotion with the motivational dimensional model of affect, we speculated that the emotional Stroop effect of a stimulus may be influenced by the biological salience and inherent motivational intensity of the stimulus. In the present study, we examined this issue with two experiments. The results indicated that both low- and high-withdrawal-motivation negative stimuli produced a robust emotional Stroop effect; however, the high-withdrawal-motivation negative stimuli produced a stronger emotional Stroop effect than the low-withdrawal-motivation negative stimuli. Regarding positive stimuli, only the high-approach-motivated positive stimuli produced the emotional Stroop effect, unlike the low-approach-motivation positive stimuli. These findings suggest that the emotional Stroop effect is modulated by the biological salience of stimuli and by the motivational intensity inherent in the stimuli. Biological salience and motivational intensity play an additive effect in the emotional Stroop effect.
Highlights
The emotional Stroop effect refers to the phenomenon that the emotional information of stimuli will delay the reaction of participants when they are asked to respond to the non-emotional information in a task (Williams et al, 1996; Algom et al, 2004)
It is believed that the negative stimuli, regardless of whether the stimuli are emotional words, emotional pictures or other types of stimuli, produce a robust emotional Stroop effect because the negative stimuli provide threat or alert information that is vital to survival (Fox et al, 2001; Schimmack and Derryberry, 2005; Wyble et al, 2008)
Existing studies have found that negative stimuli produce a robust emotional Stroop effect, and our findings are consistent with those prior findings (McKenna and Sharma, 1995; White, 1996)
Summary
The emotional Stroop effect refers to the phenomenon that the emotional information of stimuli will delay the reaction of participants when they are asked to respond to the non-emotional information in a task (Williams et al, 1996; Algom et al, 2004). Thereby, our ongoing processing of target tasks can be interrupted by the threat information of negative stimuli, which automatically captures and occupies our attention and has priority processing (Algom et al, 2004; Reynolds and Langerak, 2015; Yamaguchi and Harwood, 2015). Negative threatening stimuli will always induce an emotional Stroop effect
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