Emotional Stroop Research Articles

The emotional stroop interference effect in anxiety: attentional bias or cognitive avoidance?

Interference effects on threat words in anxious subjects on the emotional Stroop task have generally been interpreted as evidence for mood-congruent attentional bias in anxiety states. However, several recent studies have yielded results that run contrary to this attentional bias explanation. The most important of these conflicting findings show that: (1) panic disorder patients displayed interference on threat words, but also on other emotional words, including positively valenced words, and (2) ‘repressers’ showed even greater interference than high trait anxious subjects. We propose an alternative explanation for these findings, in which both attentional bias and cognitive avoidance are assumed to operate in the emotional Stroop task, but in which cognitive avoidance is hypothesized to be chiefly responsible for the greater interference effects found in anxious subjects and ‘repressers’. We suggest that future research into cognitive processes associated with anxiety states should employ a variety of experimental paradigms on the same subjects and include measures of ‘defensiveness’.

Regional brain activity when selecting a response despite interference: An H215O PET study of the stroop and an emotional stroop

The Stroop interference test requires a person to respond to specific elements of a stimulus while suppressing a competing response. Previous positron emission tomography (PET) work has shown increased activity in the right anterior cingulate gyrus during the Stroop test. It is unclear, however, whether the anterior cingulate participates more in the attentional rather than the response selection aspects of the task or whether different interference stimuli might activate different brain regions. We sought to determine (1) whether the Stroop interference task causes increased activation in the right anterior cingulate as previously reported, (2) whether this activation varied as a function of response time, (3) what brain regions were functionally linked to the cingulate during performance of the Stroop, and (4) whether a modified Stroop task involving emotionally distracting words would activate the cingulate and other limbic and paralimbic regions. Twenty-one healthy volunteers were scanned with H2 (15) O PET while they performed the Stroop interference test (standard Stroop), a modified Stroop task using distracting words with sad emotional content (sad Stroop), and a control task of naming colors. These were presented in a manner designed to maximize the response selection aspects of the task. Images were stereotactically normalized and analyzed using statistical parametric mapping (SPM). Predictably, subjects were significantly slower during the standard Stroop than the sad Stroop or the control task. The left mideingulate region robustly activated during the standard Stroop compared to the control task. The sad Stroop activated this same region, but to a less significant degree. Correlational regional network analysis revealed an inverse relationship between activation in the left mideingulate and the left insula and temporal lobe. Additionally, activity in different regions of the cingulate gyrus correlated with performance speed during the standard Stroop. These results suggest that the left midcingulate is likely to be part of a neural network activated when one attempts to override a competing verbal response. Finally, the left midcingulate region appears to be functionally coupled to the left insula, temporal, and frontal cortex during cognitive interference tasks involving language. These results underscore the important role of the cingulate gyrus in selecting appropriate and suppressing inappropriate verbal responses. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Suppression of emotional stroop effects by fear-arousal

Abstract Previous studies have suggested that subjects are slower to colour-name emotional words, when the meaning of these words is related to a fear or current concern. We carried out three experiments on subjects having either high or low fear of snakes, with the aim of replicating this finding, and of testing the effects of arousing fear in subjects at the same time. Unexpectedly, we could only replicate the predicted interference effect in the absence of threat, whether due to a snake or to another threatening stimulus. We conclude that emotional interference effects do depend on high levels of fearfulness or trait anxiety, and on a match between the content of the subjects' concerns and the meaning of the interfering material. However, this interference may be paradoxically obscured by fear arousal, or the presence of a real danger that alters processing priorities in highly fearful subjects.

Central versus peripheral prsentation of stimuli in an emotional stroop task

Abstract Four blocks of words, anxiety-related, anxiety-matched neutrals, happiness-related, and happiness-matched neutrals, were presented to subjects high and low in trait anxiety. Each block was presented once centrally and once peripherally. It was predicted that high-trait subjects would take longer to identify the colour of anxiety-related words as compared to anxiety-matched neutral words and that the magnitude of this effect should be greater for central as compared to peripheral presentation. Support was found only for the former hypothesis. Correlations demonstrated a different pattern of results for anxiety and depression. The content-specificity hypothesis is offered as an explanation for these findings.

Construct accessibility, depression and the emotional stroop task: Transient mood or stable structure?

Forty-two women who had volunteered for a project on ‘worrying’ were allocated to a ‘high’ or ‘low’ depressed group on the basis of their scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (short-form). High depression was associated with interferences in colour naming of negative compared to neutral words in an emotional Stroop Task, but this effect was more clearly marked when S s were allocated to groups on the basis of depression levels ascertained 12 months previously. The results strengthen claims made by Gotlib and McCann (1984) that interference in colour naming of negative material reflects stable biases in construct accessibility in depression-prone individuals rather than transient mood disturbance.