Abstract
In the emotional Stroop effect (ESE), people are slower to name the ink color of negative, emotion-laden words than that of neutral words. Two accounts have been suggested for the ESE, relating it to either deficient attention to color or to temporary disruption of action in the face of threat. Is the ESE driven by a threat-produced change in perception, or is it a strategic bias in responding? In a pioneer import of Signal Detection Theory to this realm, threat was found to diminish the psychological distance (d’) between the ink colors, but it did not impact response bias (β). The results indicate that the ESE derives from a deep perceptual change engendered by the negative stimuli and not from changes in the criterion for responding. These results constrain future theorizing in the domain of emotion-produced changes in behavior, and provide some support for the threat account of attention under emotion.
Highlights
Can people focus on an attribute of the stimulus when another attribute is laden with emotion or directly threatening? There is a voluminous literature concerned with this question employing mainly the paradigm known as the emotional Stroop task (e.g., Algom, Chajut, & Lev, 2004; Algom, Zakay, Monar, & Chajut, 2009; Chajut, Mama, Levi, & Algom, 2010; McKenna & Sharma, 1995, 2004; Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Trezise, 1986; Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996)
Under the inauspicious conditions of the experiment, our participants were more accurate to detect the ink color of a neutral word (65.9%) than that of an emotion word (58.6%). This difference favoring neutral words as carriers of color amounted to an emotional Stroop effect (ESE) of 7.3% (t(27) = 6.7, p < .001)
People are desensitized to the differences between stimulus attributes that are unrelated to the threat attribute
Summary
Can people focus on an attribute of the stimulus when another attribute is laden with emotion or directly threatening? There is a voluminous literature concerned with this question employing mainly the paradigm known as the emotional Stroop task (e.g., Algom, Chajut, & Lev, 2004; Algom, Zakay, Monar, & Chajut, 2009; Chajut, Mama, Levi, & Algom, 2010; McKenna & Sharma, 1995, 2004; Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Trezise, 1986; Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996). Presented with words in color, it takes people longer to name the ink color of emotion or threat words than that of neutral words, the emotional Stroop effect (ESE). According to the attention account of the ESE (e.g., Williams et al, 1996), the disproportionate amount of resources drawn by the emotion words takes a toll on naming their ink color. The experimental task calls for naming ink colors, yet people cannot avoid reading the carrier words, emotional and neutral. It is the extra amount of attention captured by the former that generates the ESE. The ESE reflects the activity of a general-purpose defense mechanism that momentarily freezes all activity that is not directly related to the threat (Algom et al, 2004; Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001)
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