Emotional Stroop Research Articles

Neural Substrates of Attentional Bias for Smoking-Related Cues: An fMRI Study

Attentional bias for drug-related stimuli, as measured by emotional Stroop (ES) tasks, is predictive of treatment outcomes for tobacco smoking and other abused drugs. Characterizing relationships between smoking-related attentional bias and brain reactivity to smoking images may help in identifying neural substrates critical to relapse vulnerability. To this end, we investigated putative relationships between interference effects in an offline smoking ES task and functional MRI (fMRI) measures of brain reactivity to smoking vs neutral images in women smokers. Positive correlations were found between attentional bias and reactivity to smoking images in brain areas involved in emotion, memory, interoception, and visual processing, including the amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, and occipital cortex. These findings suggest that smokers with elevated attentional biases to smoking-related stimuli may more readily shift attention away from other external stimuli and toward smoking stimuli-induced internal states and emotional memories. Such attentional shifts may contribute to increased interference by smoking cues, possibly increasing relapse vulnerability. Treatments capable of inhibiting shifts to drug cue-induced memories and internal states may lead to personalized tobacco dependence treatment for smokers with high attentional bias to smoking-related stimuli.

Brain Reactivity to Smoking Cues Prior to Smoking Cessation Predicts Ability to Maintain Tobacco Abstinence

Developing the means to identify smokers at high risk for relapse could advance relapse prevention therapy. We hypothesized that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reactivity to smoking-related cues, measured before a quit attempt, could identify smokers with heightened relapse vulnerability. Before quitting smoking, 21 nicotine-dependent women underwent fMRI during which smoking-related and neutral images were shown. These smokers also were tested for possible attentional biases to smoking-related words using a computerized emotional Stroop (ES) task previously found to predict relapse. Smokers then made a quit attempt and were grouped based on outcomes (abstinence vs. slip: smoking > or = 1 cigarette after attaining abstinence). Prequit fMRI and ES measurements in these groups were compared. Slip subjects had heightened fMRI reactivity to smoking-related images in brain regions implicated in emotion, interoceptive awareness, and motor planning and execution. Insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) reactivity induced by smoking images correlated with an attentional bias to smoking-related words. A discriminant analysis of ES and fMRI data predicted outcomes with 79% accuracy. Additionally, smokers who slipped had decreased fMRI functional connectivity between an insula-containing network and brain regions involved in cognitive control, including the dACC and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, possibly reflecting reduced top-down control of cue-induced emotions. These findings suggest that the insula and dACC are important substrates of smoking relapse vulnerability. The data also suggest that relapse-vulnerable smokers can be identified before quit attempts, which could enable personalized treatment, improve tobacco-dependence treatment outcomes, and reduce smoking-related morbidity and mortality.

P01-248 - Comparison of the emotional stroop effect on Korean children with ADHD and emotional disorder

ObjectiveIn classical stroop task ADHD children show core deficit in interference control in the condition of the incongruent color word: more errors and slower speed. In previous studies children with emotional disorder were found to show attentional bias in emotional stroop task in which children are asked to name quickly the color of emotional words such as ‘anxious’, ‘worried’, ‘sad’ and ‘disappointed’, while ignoring the meaning of the words. The aim of this study was to evaluate emotional stroop effect between ADHD and emotional disordered children to investigate attentional bias toward emotional stimuli.MethodsThe subjects were 22 ADHD children and 14 children who have emotional disorder, including anxiety, tic or depressive disorder. Classical stroop task as well as emotional stroop task, IQ test, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children(STAIC) and Children's Depression Inventory(CDI) were administered individually to all children.Results1.Children with emotional disorder obtained higher CDI and STAIC scores than ADHD children.2.There were no significant group difference in emotional stroop task between children with emotional disorder and ADHD even after controlling IQ.ConclusionsWe could not found that children with emotional disorder show more attentional bias toward anxiety or depression-relevant stimuli than ADHD children. Further research with large subjects and more sophisticated assessment of emotional problem is needed to elucidate emotional stroop effect.

Childhood anxiety and attention to emotion faces in a modified stroop task

This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self-report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6-12 years. The results showed an interference of colour matching for angry (relative to neutral) faces in children with elevated SC. The same effect was not found for happy or control faces. In addition, the results suggest that selective attention to angry faces in children with social concern (SC) was not significantly moderated by age.

Functional MRI study of specific animal phobia using an event-related emotional counting stroop paradigm.

Emotional interference tasks may be useful in probing anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) function to understand abnormal attentional study in individuals with specific phobia. In a 3 T functional MRI study, individuals with specific phobias of the animal subtype (SAP, n=12) and healthy comparison (HC) adults (n=12) completed an event-related emotional counting Stroop task. Individuals were presented phobia-related, negative, and neutral words and were instructed to report via button press the number of words displayed on each trial. Compared to the HC group, the SAP group exhibited greater rostral ACC activation (i.e., greater response to phobia-related words than neutral words). In this same contrast, HCs exhibited greater right amygdala and posterior insula activations as well as greater thalamic deactivation than the SAP group. Both groups exhibited anterior cingulate, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus/insula, and amygdala activations as well as thalamic deactivation. Psychophysiological interaction analysis highlighted a network of activation in these regions in response to phobia-related words in the SAP group. Taken together, these findings implicate a circuit of dysfunction, which is linked to attention abnormalities in individuals with SAP.

Attentional Bias to Personally Relevant Words in Borderline Personality Disorder is Strongly Related to Comorbid Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Current research indicates altered inhibitory functioning in borderline personality disorder (BPD). The emotional stroop task is a widely used method for investigating inhibition of interference. In the present study we used an individualized version of the emotional stroop task to investigate inhibitory functioning in BPD with respect not only to valence but also to personal relevance of the stimuli. Thirty-one BPD patients and 49 healthy controls performed the individual emotional stroop task that consisted of (1) words related to personal negative life events that were currently relevant (2) words related to personal negative life events that were not currently relevant, (3) negative words that were not personally relevant, and (4) neutral words. BPD patients showed greater interference only for words related to personal negative life events with current relevance. A comparison between BPD patients with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) revealed reduced inhibitory functioning only in BPD patients with PTSD. Inhibition of interference in BPD patients seems not to be altered in general but is exclusively disturbed in those with comorbid PTSD when highly relevant personal factors are the focus of attention.

Disgust and Contamination Fear: Attention, Memory, and Judgment of Stimulus Situations

Biases of attention and memory for disgust have been recently observed. Additionally, the relevance of disgust to contamination fear has been well documented in self-report and behavior avoidance tests. The present study examined the role of disgust in attention and memory bias in individuals with elevated contamination fear, compared to those with high trait anxiety and non-anxious controls. Further, an interpretive bias task was administered. Sixty participants (n = 20 per group) were identified and engaged in a masked emotional stroop test, implicit memory task, and ambiguous interpretation task. The results did not support the hypothesis that individuals with elevated contamination fear would show biases of attention or memory for disgust information, when compared to neutral or social threat material. However, there was evidence of an interpretation bias such that individuals with high contamination fear showed a tendency to interpret situations based on disgust reactions. The findings are discussed ...

Neural Mechanisms of Grief Regulation

The death of an attachment figure triggers intrusive thoughts of the deceased, sadness, and yearning for reunion. Recovery requires reduction of symptoms. We hypothesized that symptoms might correlate with a capacity to regulate attention toward reminders of the deceased, and activity in, and functional connectivity between, prefrontal regulatory regions and the amygdala. Twenty recently bereaved subjects rated intrusive thoughts of the deceased versus a capacity to avoid thoughts (grief style). Reaction time was measured while subjects completed an Emotional Stroop (ES) task contrasting deceased-related with control words during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Subjects subsequently visualized the death of the deceased and rated induced emotions. Subjects demonstrated attentional bias toward deceased-related words. Bias magnitude correlated with amygdala, insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity. Amygdala activity predicted induced sadness intensity. A double dissociation between grief style and both prefrontal and amygdala subregion activity was found. Intrusiveness correlated with activation of ventral amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate (rACC); avoidance correlated with deactivation of dorsal amygdala and DLPFC. A double dissociation between regulatory region and task-dependent functional connectivity (FC) was found. High DLPFC-amygdala FC correlated with reduced attentional bias, while low rACC-amygdala FC predicted sadness intensity. Results are consistent with a model in which activity in and functional connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal regulatory regions indexes differences in mourners' regulation of attention and sadness during pangs of grief, and may be used to distinguish between clinically relevant differences in grief style.

Cognitive Interference or Emotional Interference:Comparison of PIU College Students'Implicit Mental Characteristics

PIU(Pathological Internet Use) is a term used to denote problematic Internet use.Young's eight criteria deduced from the problematic gambling standard of DSM is often used to diagnose PIU.It can be diagnosed as long as one fulfills more than five criteria.The incidence of PIU is about 6%~14% and it can result in mental and physical problems.Pressure,personality,and cognitive characteristics are contributors to PIU,of which implicit cognitive characteristics and implicit cognitive strategies are the key factors.There are two paradigms of implicit cognition characteristics in the current research;one is an implicit association paradigm and the other is a STROOP paradigm.Both of these take RT(reaction time) as the main index. A total of 671 college students were chosen from Grades 1 to 4 as subjects,of which 56 were PIU students.According to the diagnosis scores,the non-PIU subjects were divided into three groups: high addictive tendency group(172),low score group(167),and people between them(286).We adopted a 4×2 mixed design and used a computer for this experiment.Four groups of subjects finished the traditional STROOP experiment and the emotional STROOP experiment,both of which require subjects to denominate the colors of emotional words(i.e.,positive or negative),neutral words,and Internet-related words,then record their RT. The results indicate that:(1) there was a significant difference between the RT of PIU subjects and high addictive tendency subjects on Internet-related words and that of neutral ones(T values were 12.62 and 11.38,p﹤0.01);(2) the average RT of female subjects on Internet-related words and neutral words were 411.97 and 394.36.Males' RTs were 427.68 and 401.41-however,there was no significant difference between male subjects and female ones;(3) there was a significant difference in RT for emotional words,among the four groups.There was no significant difference for neutral words. The RT of college students with PIU and those with high addictive tendency on Internet-related words was larger than those of the other two groups,and showed cognitive interference;the RT for emotional words was also larger than for the other two groups,and showed emotional interference.

Researches and Application of the Emotional Stroop Effect in Clinical Psychology

As far as we know, Stroop effect was discovered by a American Psychologist named John Riddley Stroop with a definition of interference between the color and the meaning of the same stimulus. It has been make good use in many fields, especially in clinical psychology. Emotional stroop effect which became the highlight during the past two decades. So its main researches and focus will be showed in details here, such as, social phobia, anxiety & anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence, heroin, gambling, and compulsive disorders. Besides, clinical evidences and academic explanations are also concluded. Then the future of this study would be discussed in the end.

Avoiding Interference: Adult Attachment and Emotional Processing Biases

The present study investigated attachment-related differences in emotional processing biases. Consistent with the proposal that avoidant individuals limit attention to potentially distressing information, attachment avoidance was associated with reductions in emotional Stroop (ES) interference for attachment-related words (e.g., intimate, loss). These biases were strongest among individuals who were currently in a romantic relationship, suggesting that being in a close relationship may activate avoidant defensive strategies. In addition, avoidant attentional biases were attenuated under cognitive load, suggesting that inhibiting attention to attachment-related information requires cognitive effort. Finally, avoidance was unrelated to ES performance for emotional, nonattachment-related words, demonstrating the specificity of these attentional biases. The present findings suggest that avoidant individuals can inhibit attention to potentially threatening information, that this ability requires cognitive effort, and that relationship status may be an important moderator of avoidant defensive strategies. The implications of these strategies for emotional functioning and well-being are discussed.

Cognitive bias in dizziness: Emotional stroop and autobiographical memories

Dizziness is commonly associated with anxiety, and is often caused by a dysfunction of the balance system. While a link between dizziness and both anxiety disorders and depression has been established, less is known about information processing in dizziness. In the first experiment we tested whether 15 patients with dizziness would display an emotional Stroop effect for panic-related words. Also included was a control group of 15 persons. The Stroop task was preceded by ratings of personal relevance of the Stroop words and followed by a surprise free recall of the words. Results showed a Stroop effect for panic-related words in the dizziness group, but the interaction did not reach significance (p = 0.08). Separate analysis of dizziness-related panic words however resulted in a significant group × condition interaction. In the free recall of Stroop words a main effect of word category was found, with more panic-related words being recalled. The second experiment investigated autobiographical memories in 14 patients with dizziness and 14 matched controls. Results showed a group × condition interaction with less specific memories being recalled following positive cue-words in the dizziness group. The overall pattern of results suggests that dizziness is related to deficits in information processing, which could be targeted in treatment.

Neural correlates of the classic color and emotional stroop in women with abuse-related posttraumatic stress disorder

Background The anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex play an important role in the inhibition of responses, as measured by the Stroop task, as well as in emotional regulation. Dysfunction of the anterior cingulate/medial prefrontal cortex has been implicated in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The purpose of this study was to use the Stroop task as a probe of anterior cingulate function in PTSD. Methods Women with early childhood sexual abuse-related PTSD ( n = 12) and women with abuse but without PTSD ( n = 9) underwent positron emission tomographic measurement of cerebral blood flow during exposure to control, color Stroop, and emotional Stroop conditions. Results Women with abuse with PTSD (but not abused non-PTSD women) had a relative decrease in anterior cingulate blood flow during exposure to the emotional (but not color) classic Stroop task. During the color Stroop there were also relatively greater increases in blood flow in non-PTSD compared with PTSD women in right visual association cortex, cuneus, and right inferior parietal lobule. Conclusions These findings add further evidence for dysfunction of a network of brain regions, including anterior cingulate and visual and parietal cortex, in abuse-related PTSD.

Relationships of distinct affective dimensions to performance on an emotional stroop task

Few studies have examined the nature of enhanced selective attention to threatening stimuli with regard to distinct affective dimensions in nonclinical samples. No study to date has explored the relationships of multiple anxiety-related dimensions to performance on an emotional Stroop task. An adult sample without history of spontaneous panic attacks (N = 138) participated in an emotional Stroop task, and performance was analyzed in light of several types of self-reported anxiety. Only anxiety sensitivity distinguished individuals who showed a pattern of interference to threat information from those who showed a pattern of facilitation. No anxiety type was associated with reaction time patterns to appetitive distractors. These results highlight the importance of deconstructing anxiety into separate dimensions such that unique relationships between anxiety types and cognitive processing can be examined.

Test-Retest Reliability of the Emotional Stroop Task: Examining the Paradox of Measurement Change

The Emotional Stroop (ES) task (I. H. Gotlib & C. D. McCann, 1984) has been proposed as an experimental measure to assess the processing of emotion or the bias in attention of emotion-laden information. However, study results have not been consistent. To further examine its reliability for empirical research, the authors of this study administered the ES task to 33 participants on 2 separate occasions separated by 1 week. Results indicated that retest reliabilities for reaction times (RTs) derived from the 3 separate emotion conditions (manic, neutral, and depressive) across the 1 week interval were very high. However, consistent with previous research, the reliabilities were very low for the interference indices (manic and depressive). These low reliabilities reflect the very high intercorrelation between the RTs derived from the 3 conditions. The authors concluded that a better indicator of the reliability for this task is the individual RTs from each emotion condition.

Priming of the emotional stroop effect by a schema questionnaire. An experimental study of test order

Forty persons were administered an emotional Stroop task with separation-related words and neutral words, together with the abandonment scale from Young's Schema Questionnaire (SQ). Half of the participants were administered the SQ abandonment scale prior to the Stroop task and half were administered it after the Stroop task. The results showed that priming by the SQ abandonment scale produced Stroop interference for unmasked separation words. This suggests that attentional bias is influenced by priming, and that it may be methodologically important to control possible priming factors when administering Stroop tasks and other measures of attentional bias.

The emotional stroop task and chronic pain: what is threatening for chronic pain sufferers?

Using a computer version of the emotional stroop task, it was investigated whether chronic pain patients display an involuntary attentional shift towards pain-related information (sensory, affective pain words and injury related words). Multiple regression analyses were used to investigate which pain and psychosocial variables (pain severity, pain-related fear, pain catastrophizing and negative affect) were predictive of attentional bias. Results indicated: (1) that there was an attentional bias towards the sensory pain words; and (2) that current pain intensity was predictive of the effect. No other attentional effects were found. The results are discussed in terms of possible reasons for the difficulty of demonstrating attentional bias in chronic pain patients. Copyright 2000 European Federation of Chapters of the International Association for the Study of Pain

Trait differences in affective and attentional responding to threat revealed by emotional stroop interference and startle reflex modulation

This study utilized startle reflex and reaction time (RT) measures to examine the hypothesis that anxious individuals exhibit an attentional bias for threatening information. High and low trait-anxious (HTA; LTA) participants performed an emotional Stroop task in which pleasant, neutral, and threat words were presented under conditions of anticipation, or no anticipation, of electric shock. Acoustic startle probes were presented during the interval between word presentation and production of the color-naming response. HTA participants showed longer color-naming RT for threat words than pleasant words under both shock anticipation and safe conditions of the procedure. Under safe conditions, startle patterns paralleled these effects with HTA participants exhibiting smaller blink responses—indicating greater allocation of processing resources—for threat words than pleasant words. Under shock anticipation conditions, HTA individuals showed an opposite response pattern: startle blinks were potentiated for threat words relative to pleasant, indicating that the emotional impact of the threat words was enhanced by the aversive mood state. Despite evidence that the startle response effects were limited by habituation to the first half (180 trials) of the procedure, these findings support the hypothesis that HTA individuals possess an attentional bias for threatening information and exhibit greater defensive emotional reactivity to threat cues during states of heightened negative affectivity than low anxious individuals.

Mesolimbic activity associated with psychosis in schizophrenia. Symptom-specific PET studies.

Hallucinations and paranoid delusions are prominent among the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. Such psychotic symptoms are notable for their aberrant representations of, and relation to, the external world and for the emotional/motivational valence associated with the representations. As mesolimbic structures, including the amygdala and ventral striatum, are thought to play a significant role in imparting emotional valence to external stimuli, we here examine the mesolimbic findings of H215O PET studies designed to probe the functional neuroanatomy of psychosis. Patients with schizophrenia (including those with active hallucinations, those with active paranoid delusions, and those without active positive symptoms at the time of scanning) and healthy control subjects were studied. An event-related PET paradigm was used to identify the neural correlates of hallucinations, and a modified emotional stroop paradigm (with threat versus neutral words) was used to test the hypothesis that paranoid patients would have increased mesolimbic activity in response to threat, and even in response to neutral stimuli. The findings suggest that the positive psychotic symptoms of hallucinations and delusions share similar functional neuroanatomical features of increased mesotemporal and ventral striatal activity in the setting of decreased prefrontal activity. The pattern is evident even in a neutral context, unlike the case for normal subjects, who show such features only in response to threat. The implications of these findings for a pathophysiology of psychosis will be discussed in the context of the behavioral neuroanatomical literature in animals and humans.

Performance on the emotional stroop task in groups of anxious, expert, and control subjects: A comparison of computer and card presentation formats

Abstract A number of information processing paradigms have been adapted from the cognitive psychology literature in order to investigate processing biases associated with emotional disorder. The most widely used of these methodologies has been the emotional Stroop task and this paper reports two experiments designed to examine some of the issues surrounding the application of this paradigm with groups of anxious subjects. Experiment 1 involved the use of a computer-presentation Stroop task with groups of high- and low-trait anxious subjects and a third group of 'expert' subjects to investigate the nature of the Stroop effect with a set of words related to their area of expertise. Experiment 2 reports the use of a card-presentation format with high- and low-trait anxious subjects. The results from the two methodologies show discrepancies which are broadly consistent with the previous literature on these two versions of the task. In addition, there was a highly significant Stroop effect associated with expe...