Incongruent Color Words Research Articles

A spatial version of the Stroop task for examining proactive and reactive control independently from non-conflict processes.

Conflict-induced control refers to humans' ability to regulate attention in the processing of target information (e.g., the color of a word in the color-word Stroop task) based on experience with conflict created by distracting information (e.g., an incongruent color word), and to do so either in a proactive (preparatory) or a reactive (stimulus-driven) fashion. Interest in conflict-induced control has grown recently, as has the awareness that effects attributed to those processes might be affected by conflict-unrelated processes (e.g., the learning of stimulus-response associations). This awareness has resulted in the recommendation to move away from traditional interference paradigms with small stimulus/response sets and towards paradigms with larger sets (at least four targets, distractors, and responses), paradigms that allow better control of non-conflict processes. Using larger sets, however, is not always feasible. Doing so in the Stroop task, for example, would require either multiple arbitrary responses that are difficult for participants to learn (e.g., manual responses to colors) or non-arbitrary responses that can be difficult for researchers to collect (e.g., vocal responses in online experiments). Here, we present a spatial version of the Stroop task that solves many of those problems. In this task, participants respond to one of six directions indicated by an arrow, each requiring a specific, non-arbitrary manual response, while ignoring the location where the arrow is displayed. We illustrate the usefulness of this task by showing the results of two experiments in which evidence for proactive and reactive control was obtained while controlling for the impact of non-conflict processes.

Proactive control of attention in math-anxious individuals

Attentional control deficit has been proposed as one of the reasons for lower arithmetical performance in people with high math anxiety (HMA). Previous research trying to discern whether this deficit concerned proactive or reactive use of attentional control has been criticised because the methodologies used were mostly suited to investigating reactive control only. The aim of this study was to investigate proactive control in HMA individuals in a classical Stroop task. Twenty HMA and 20 low math-anxious individuals (LMA) named the ink colour in which congruent and incongruent colour words as well as X strings (neutral condition) were presented. The HMA group was slower than their LMA peers in the congruent and incongruent conditions only. Furthermore, HMA individuals showed a higher interference effect. Last, only LMA participants showed a facilitatory effect of the congruent condition. These results are interpreted as indicating the presence in the HMA individuals of a task conflict between the task to perform (ink naming) and an irrelevant task triggered by the stimuli (word reading). Task conflict is evident only when proactive control, responsible for maintaining the current goals, is too weak to solve the competition between tasks. Therefore, this study confirms that HMA individuals find it difficult to implement attention proactively.

Electrophysiological Evidence of Anticipatory Cognitive Control in the Stroop Task.

The Stroop task has been largely used to explore the ability to inhibit the automatic process of reading when reporting the ink color of incongruent color-words. Given the extensive literature regarding the processes involved in task performance, here we aimed at exploring the anticipatory brain activities during the Stroop task using the event-related potential (ERP) method. To accomplish this, eighteen participants performed two different blocks where neutral words were intermixed with congruent and incongruent words, respectively. Results revealed consistent pre-stimulus activity over the frontal, premotor and parietal brain areas. The premotor and the parietal activities were also modulated by the Stroop effect, being more enhanced in the incongruent than in the congruent blocks. Present findings add on the current literature pointing at an unexplored locus of anticipatory cognitive control during task preparation, thus offering a new way to investigate top-down preparatory processes of performance control in the Stroop task.

The color-word Stroop effect driven by working memory maintenance.

Previous research has shown that holding a color word in working memory can produce interference effects in an intervening color-identification task, which mimics the classic color-word Stroop effect. Although this finding has previously been considered to suggest that the content of working memory can have behavioral consequences similar to those of externally perceived stimuli, it has remained unclear whether active internal maintenance of a color word indeed makes a critical contribution to the working memory Stroop effect. In the present study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to perform a color-identification task following display of eithera congruent or anincongruent color word. By controlling for encoding strategy and/or maintenance demand across Experiments 1-4, we consistently showed that the magnitude of the congruency effect in color-identification performance was markedly larger when the recently presented color word was actively retained in working memory, as compared to when the color word was perceptually identified without working memory processing, when the color word had once been remembered but was no longer being actively maintained in working memory, or when the color word was retro-cued to be irrelevant to the working memory task. The findings therefore demonstrate a critical role for active internal maintenance of a color word in producing the working memory Stroop effect. In addition, Experiment 5 further showed that the working memory Stroop effect was sustained over time during the retention interval. Moreover, we found that the intervening color-identification task conversely influenced working memory maintenance, leading to poorer memory performance on incongruent than on congruent trials. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the linkage between working memory and attention.

Incidental memory for colour word associates processed in colour naming and reading aloud tasks: is a blue ocean more memorable than a yellow one?

ABSTRACTCongruency effects for colour word associates (e.g., ocean) have been reported in Stroop colour naming tasks. However, incidental memory for such words after word reading and colour naming tasks has not been examined. In the current study, participants incidentally recalled colour word associates (e.g., ocean) and neutral words (e.g., lawyer) immediately after naming their font colour (Experiment 1a) or reading them aloud (Experiment 1b). In both tasks, recall was better for congruent colour word associates (e.g., ocean appearing in blue) than incongruent colour word associates (e.g., ocean appearing in green) or neutral items (lawyer appearing in blue).This outcome is consistent with the idea that co-activation of a semantic colour code and a lexical representation strengthens the episodic memory representation and makes it more accessible.

Altered relationship between prefrontal glutamate and activation during cognitive control in people with high trait anxiety

Trait anxiety can affect cognitive control resulting in ineffective and/or inefficient task performance. Moreover, previous functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies have reported altered dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity in anxious cohorts, particularly when executive control is required. Recently, it has been demonstrated that cortical glutamate levels can predict both functional activation during cognitive control, and anxiety levels. In the present study we sought to investigate the relationship between trait anxiety, prefrontal glutamate levels and functional activation in DLPFC during a cognitive control task. Thirty-nine participants assigned to either low trait anxiety (LTA) or high trait anxiety (HTA) groups underwent 1H-Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (1H-MRS) to measure levels of resting glutamate in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Participants also completed fMRI during a Stroop task comprising congruent and incongruent colour word trials. The HTA group showed reduced task performance relative to the LTA group. In the LTA group, there was a positive association between PFC Glu levels and DLPFC activation during incongruent trials. This association was absent in the HTA group. Individual differences in trait anxiety affect the relationship between PFC glutamate levels and DLPFC activation, possibly contributing to ineffective task performance when cognitive control is required.

The impairing effect of dyspnea on response inhibition.

Dyspnea (=breathlessness) is an aversive and threatening symptom in various prevalent diseases. Established treatment procedures aim for behavioral changes in dyspneic patients in order to treat dyspnea successfully. To achieve these behavioral changes, response inhibition as one key executive function for goal-directed behavior is an important prerequisite. However, the impact of dyspnea on response inhibition is widely unknown. Therefore, the present study aimed at testing whether experimentally induced dyspnea would impair response inhibition. Thirty-six healthy participants performed the color-word Stroop task during an unloaded baseline and a resistive load-induced dyspnea condition. Response inhibition was investigated using behavioral measures (reaction time, accuracy) and, based on literature, the late positive complex (LPC) in the electroencephalogram. Furthermore, the N400 was investigated in an exploratory analysis. The results showed significantly reduced accuracy for incongruent compared to congruent color-words in the Stroop task during the dyspnea condition (p < .001) which was paralleled by a smaller LPC and a more negative centro-parietal N400 for incongruent color-words during the dyspnea compared to the baseline condition (p < .05). Possibly, during dyspnea more neural resources are allocated towards the semantic processing of incongruent color-words indexed as the N400 which are then not available for the partly overlapping LPC as an index for response inhibition. These findings demonstrate that resistive load-induced dyspnea has an impairing effect on response inhibition in healthy participants, both in terms of behavioral performance and respective neural processing. This might impair treatment efforts aimed at behavioral changes in patients suffering from dyspnea.

Context-specific proportion congruent effects: Compound-cue contingency learning in disguise.

Conflict between task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimulus information leads to impairment in response speed and accuracy. For instance, in the colour-word Stroop paradigm, participants respond slower and less accurately to the print colour of incongruent colour words (e.g., "red" printed in green) than to congruent colour words (e.g., "green" in green). Importantly, this congruency effect is diminished when the trials in an experiment are mostly incongruent, relative to mostly congruent, termed a proportion congruent effect. When distracting stimuli are mostly congruent in one context (e.g., location or font) but mostly incongruent in another context (e.g., another location or font), the congruency effect is still diminished in the mostly incongruent context, termed a context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effect. Both the standard proportion congruent and CSPC effects are typically interpreted in terms of conflict-driven attentional control, frequently termed conflict adaptation or conflict monitoring. However, in two experiments, we investigated contingency learning confounds in context-specific proportion congruent effects. In particular, two variants of a dissociation procedure are presented with the font variant of the CSPC procedure. In both, robust contingency learning effects were observed. No evidence for context-specific control was observed. In fact, results trended in the wrong direction. In all, the results suggest that CSPC effects may not be a useful way of studying attentional control.

The magic of words reconsidered: Investigating the automaticity of reading color-neutral words in the Stroop task.

In 2 variants of the color-word Stroop task, we compared 5 types of color-neutral distractors-real words (e.g., HAT), pseudowords (e.g., HIX), consonant strings (e.g., HDK), symbol strings (e.g., #$%), and a row of Xs (e.g., XXX)-as well as incongruent color words (e.g., GREEN displayed in red). When participants named the color, relative to a row of Xs, words and pseudowords interfered equally and more than the consonant strings, which in turn interfered more than the symbols. In contrast, when participants identified the color by manual key-press responses, all 5 types of neutral strings produced equal color response latencies. In both tasks, the incongruent color words produced robust interference relative to the color-neutral words. Reaction time (RT) distribution analyses showed that all interference effects (relative to the row of Xs) increased across the quantiles. We interpret these results in terms of an evidence accumulation process in which the interfering distractor reduces the effective rate of evidence accumulation for the color target. We take the results to argue that the task of reading, even when triggered unintentionally, is not an invariant process driven solely by the stimulus properties, and is instead guided by the task goal. (PsycINFO Database Record

Using two web-based addiction Stroops to measure the attentional bias in adults with Internet Gaming Disorder.

Background and aimsPeople with substance abuse and pathological gamblers show an attentional bias. In a laboratory setting, we found an attentional bias using an addiction Stroop in adults with Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). We aimed at investigating this effect using two web-based experiments.MethodsStudy 1: Gamers with IGD, casual gamers, and non-gamers (N = 81, 28.1 ± 7.8 years) completed a web-based addiction Stroop with a fully randomized word order. They saw computer-related and neutral words in four colors and indicated the word color via keypress. Study 2: Gamers with IGD, casual gamers, and non-gamers (N = 87, 23.4 ± 5.1 years) completed a web-based addiction Stroop and a classical Stroop (incongruent color and neutral words), which both had a block design. We expected that in both studies, only the gamers with IGD would react more slowly to computer-related words in the addiction Stroop. All groups were expected to react more slowly to incongruent color words in the classical Stroop.ResultsIn neither study did the gamers with IGD differ in their reaction times to computer-related words compared to neutral words. In Study 2, all groups reacted more slowly to incongruent color words than to neutral words confirming the validity of the online reaction time assessment.DiscussionGamers with IGD did not show a significant attentional bias. IGD may differ from substance abuse and pathological gambling in this respect; alternatively experimenting on the Internet may have introduced error variance that made it harder to detect a bias.

Attentional constraints on semantic activation: Evidence from Stroop's paradigm

It is widely believed that semantic activation from print is automatic in the sense that it is capacity free. Two experiments addressed this issue in the context of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm. Participants identified whether a tone was high or low in pitch in Task 1, and named the color carried by an irrelevant word in Task 2. Tasks 1 and 2 were separated by a short or long SOA. In Experiment 1 incongruent color words and neutral words served as irrelevant distractors, whereas in Experiment 2 the distractors consisted of incongruent color associates (e.g., tomato) and the same set of neutral items. Additionally, the proportion of short and long SOAs between Task 1 and Task 2 varied across blocks, within subjects (e.g., 80:20), so as to determine whether the bottlenecking of semantic activation and response competition reported previously is best construed as structural, or subject to performance optimization. Replicating Miller, Ulrich, and Rolke (2009), SOA Proportion interacted with SOA in both experiments, consistent with performance optimization. In contrast, replicating Besner and Reynolds (2014), SOA and Congruency had additive effects on RT in both experiments, consistent with an account in which both response competition and semantic activation are bottlenecked. The best account to date is that (i) semantic processing and response competition are structurally bottlenecked (require some form of capacity), whereas (ii) other anonymous processes are subject to performance optimization.

Disentangling Genuine Semantic Stroop Effects in Reading from Contingency Effects: On the Need for Two Neutral Baselines.

The automaticity of reading is often explored through the Stroop effect, whereby color-naming is affected by color words. Color associates (e.g., “sky”) also produce a Stroop effect, suggesting that automatic reading occurs through to the level of semantics, even when reading sub-lexically (e.g., the pseudohomophone “skigh”). However, several previous experiments have confounded congruency with contingency learning, whereby faster responding occurs for more frequent stimuli. Contingency effects reflect a higher frequency-pairing of the word with a font color in the congruent condition than in the incongruent condition due to the limited set of congruent pairings. To determine the extent to which the Stroop effect can be attributed to contingency learning of font colors paired with lexical (word-level) and sub-lexical (phonetically decoded) letter strings, as well as assess facilitation and interference relative to contingency effects, we developed two neutral baselines: each one matched on pair-frequency for congruent and incongruent color words. In Experiments 1 and 3, color words (e.g., “blue”) and their pseudohomophones (e.g., “bloo”) produced significant facilitation and interference relative to neutral baselines, regardless of whether the onset (i.e., first phoneme) was matched to the color words. Color associates (e.g., “ocean”) and their pseudohomophones (e.g., “oshin”), however, showed no significant facilitation or interference relative to onset matched neutral baselines (Experiment 2). When onsets were unmatched, color associate words produced consistent facilitation on RT (e.g., “ocean” vs. “dozen”), but pseudohomophones (e.g., “oshin” vs. “duhzen”) failed to produce facilitation or interference. Our findings suggest that the Stroop effects for color and associated stimuli are sensitive to the type of neutral baseline used, as well as stimulus type (word vs. pseudohomophone). In general, contingency learning plays a large role when repeating congruent items more than incongruent items, but appropriate pair-frequency matched neutral baselines allow for the assessment of genuine facilitation and interference. Using such baselines, we found reading processes proceed to a semantic level for familiar words, but not pseudohomophones (i.e., phonetic decoding). Such assessment is critical for separating the effects of genuine congruency from contingency during automatic word reading in the Stroop task, and when used with color associates, isolates the semantic contribution.

The Unconscious Experimentally Demonstrated by Means of Hypnosis

Although taken for granted today by people and by some experts, the unconscious has never been experimentally demonstrated. Even for the psychoanalysts, the unconscious is nothing more than a model. The unconscious, if anything, is normally obscured by conscious activities and can only express itself in response to conditions leading to non-ordinary mental expressions, for instance during hypnosis. For many years, we have been using hypnosis in variegating experimental setting, and we think one of the evidences coming from our tests is the experimental demonstration that the unconscious exists and can be forced to respond to solicitations the participant is not aware of. We administered hypnotic suggestions to highly-hypnotizable normal participants with the aim of inducing hallucination of body heating, alexia, amusia, spatial neglect, focused analgesia, general anaesthesia, and age regression. Following such suggestions, participants actually experienced a sensation of heat, incapability to read, lack of interest in a side of the world, indifference to painful stimuli, and revivification of infantile age, respectively. But this is not all. Through the above-mentioned suggestions we also obtained some physical reactions that could only be defined as unconscious, i.e. increase of the stroke volume and of the mesenteric artery flow following hallucinated body heating, reduction of reaction times to incongruent color words in a Stroop task following alexia, prolongation of ipsilateral reaction times following spatial neglect, reduction of mismatch negativity to deviant stimuli following hypnotic amusia, coherent modifications of the sympathetic/parasympathetic balance to trigeminal and non-trigeminal pain during analgesia and anaesthesia, reduction of Raven score and Raven-induced stress during age regression. These responses evoked during hypnosis in response to mental images are clearly non-voluntary and non-conscious, and demonstrate in experimental setting with the tools that are typical of human physiology—the existence of unconscious to perceive and react.

About the unidirectionality of interference: Insight from the musical Stroop effect

The asymmetry of interference in a Stroop task usually refers to the well-documented result that incongruent colour words slow colour naming (Stroop effect) but incongruent colours do not slow colour word reading (no reverse Stroop effect). A few other studies have suggested that, more generally, a reverse Stroop effect can be occasionally observed but at the expense of the Stroop effect itself, as if interference was inherently unidirectional, from the stronger to the weaker of the two competing processes. We describe here a situation conducive to a pervasive mutual interference effect. Musicians were exposed to congruent and incongruent note name/note position patterns, and they were asked either to read the word while ignoring the location of the note within the staff, or to name the note while ignoring the note name written inside the note picture. Most of the participants exhibited interference in the two tasks. Overall, this result pattern runs against the still prevalent model of the Stroop phenomenon [Cohen, J. D., Dunbar, K., & McClelland, J. L. (1990). On the control of automatic processes: A parallel distributed processing account of the Stroop effect. Psychological Review, 97(3), 332-361]. However, further analyses lend support to one of the key tenets of the model, namely that the pattern of interference depends on the relative strength of the two competing pathways. The reasons for the impressive differences between the results collected in the present study and in the standard colour-word (or picture-word) paradigms are also examined. We suggest that these differences reveal the importance of stimulus-response contingency in the formation of automatisms.

The Role of Visual Stimuli in Cross-Modal Stroop Interference.

It has long been known that naming the color of a color word leads to what is known as the Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935). In the traditional Stroop task, when compared to naming the color of a color-neutral stimulus (e.g. an X or color patch), the presence of an incongruent color word decreases performance (Stroop interference), and a congruent color word increases performance (Stroop facilitation). Research has also shown that auditory color words can impact the color naming performance of colored items in a similar way in a variation known as cross-modal Stroop (Cowan & Barron, 1987). However, whether the item that is colored interacts with the auditory distractor to affect cross-modal Stroop interference is unclear. Research with the traditional, visual Stroop task has suggested that the amount of color the visual item displays and the semantic and phonetic components of the colored word can affect the magnitude of the resulting Stroop interference; as such, it is possible the same components could play a role in cross-modal Stroop interference. We conducted two experiments to examine the impact of the composition of the colored visual item on cross-modal Stroop interference. However, across two different experiments, three test versions, and numerous sets of trials, we were only able to find a small effect of the visual stimulus. This finding suggests that while the impact of the auditory stimuli is consistent and robust, the influence of non-word visual stimuli is quite small and unreliable and, while occasionally being statistically significant, it is not practically so.

You can’t Stroop a lexical decision: Is semantic processing fundamentally facilitative?

It is well documented that related prime words facilitate target processing in lexical decision (e.g., doctor facilitates nurse), but interfere with target processing in the Stroop task (e.g., the word blue slows the time to name the colour red). Five experiments explored several potential explanations for these differences. In Experiments 1 and 2, all stimuli were novel (as in a typical lexical decision design). Participants were faster both to make lexical decisions and to read colour words aloud that were primed by incongruent associates (e.g., banana) relative to a neutral prime (e.g., knot). Experiments 3 and 4 used a small set of repeatedly presented stimuli (as in a typical Stroop design). Incongruent colour words facilitated lexical decisions to target colour words, but interfered with identification (reading aloud). Experiment 5 further showed that interference is still observed in identification when the distractor set size is large but the target/response set size is small. These findings suggest that semantic connections are solely facilitative and that response competition only occurs when there is a small set of repeated responses and identification (rather than lexical decision) is required. The more general problem of research fragmentation is briefly discussed.

Stroop/reverse-Stroop interference in typical development and its relation to symptoms of ADHD

This study examined prepotent response inhibition among 376 children and young adults divided into five age groups: 23 5-6-year-olds, 80 7-8-year-olds, 72 9-10-year-olds, 98 11-12-year-olds, and 70 young adults (19-24-year-olds). The Stroop/reverse-Stroop test was administered with a manual response. This test measured Stroop interference, which occurred when naming the ink color of the incongruent color word stimuli (for instance the word red printed in blue ink), and the reverse-Stroop interference, which occurred when reading the stimuli. This study also examined the relation between performance on the Stroop/reverse-Stroop test and scores on the ADHD Rating Scale-IV. Results indicated that the Stroop interference decreased with age, whereas the reverse-Stroop interference increased with age. Results also showed that all three scores in the ADHD Rating Scale-IV, two subscale scores of inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive symptoms and a total score, correlated with the Stroop interference, but not with the reverse-Stroop interference in typically developing children. These results indicated the difference in mechanism between the Stroop interference and the reverse-Stoop interference, and suggested that the Stroop interference is strongly correlated with ADHD symptoms in typically developing children.

Dynamic exercise improves cognitive function in association with increased prefrontal oxygenation

The Stroop test was performed before and after ergometer exercise for 15min at 20, 40, and 60% of maximum voluntary exercise (EXmax), in order to examine whether dynamic exercise is capable of improving cognitive function and whether the changes in regional cerebral blood flow of the prefrontal cortex are associated with the cognitive improvement. Subjects were asked to answer the displayed color of incongruent color words as quickly as possible. The total time period and the number of errors for the Stroop test were measured as an index of cognitive function. The concentrations of oxygenated-hemoglobin (Oxy-Hb) and deoxygenated-hemoglobin (Deoxy-Hb) in the cerebral prefrontal area were measured with near-infrared spectroscopy to determine the changes in regional cerebral blood flow. Ergometer exercise at 40% of EXmax, but not 20 and 60% of EXmax, shortened (P<0.05) the total time period for the Stroop test by 6.6±1.5% as compared to the time control. In contrast, the number of errors was not altered by exercise at any intensity. The Oxy-Hb in bilateral prefrontal cortices increased during the Stroop test, while the Deoxy-Hb in those areas was unchanged. Ergometer exercise at 40% of EXmax, but not at 20 and 60% of EXmax, significantly augmented the response in the prefrontal Oxy-Hb during the Stroop test. The magnitude of the increased prefrontal Oxy-Hb response tended to correlate with the reduction in total time period for the Stroop test. Thus, it is likely that ergometer exercise at moderate intensity for 15min may improve cognitive function through the increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex.

Semantic Conflict Processing in the Color-Word Stroop and the Emotional Stroop

With the aim of establishing the temporal locus of the semantic conflict in color-word Stroop and emotional Stroop phenomena, we analyzed the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) elicited by nonwords, incongruent and congruent color words, colored words with positive and negative emotional valence, and colored words with neutral valence. The incongruent, positive, negative, and neutral stimuli produced interference in the behavioral response to the color of the stimuli. The P150/N170 amplitude was sensitive to the semantic equivalence of both dimensions of the congruent color words. The P3b amplitude was smaller in response to incongruent color words and to positive, negative, and neutral colored words than in response to the congruent color words and colored nonwords. There were no differences in the ERPs induced in response to colored words with positive, negative, and neutral valence. Therefore, the P3b amplitude was sensitive to interference from the semantic content of the incongruent, positive, negative, and neutral words in the color-response task, independently of the emotional content of the colored words. In addition, the P3b amplitude was smaller in response to colored words with positive, negative, and neutral valence than in response to the incongruent color words. Overall, these data indicate that the temporal locus of the semantic conflict generated by the incongruent color words (in the color-word Stroop task) and by colored words with positive, negative, and neutral valence (in the emotional Stroop task) appears to occur in the range 300–450 ms post-stimulus.

Neuropeptide S receptor gene: Fear-specific modulations of prefrontal activation

Since central administration of neuropeptide S (NPS) has been shown to exert anxiolytic effects on rodent behavior in a number of studies, genetic variants of its cognate G-protein coupled receptor (NPSR1) became the focus of several recent human studies on anxiety and anxiety disorders. The T allele of rs324981, which goes along with enhanced receptor function, was associated with panic disorder, increased anxiety sensitivity in healthy subjects, attenuated prefrontal brain activation and elevated amygdala responses to fear-relevant stimuli. To investigate whether prefrontal attenuations in rs324981 T allele carriers are specific to fear-relevant stimulus content and cannot be attributed to a generally higher interference of emotional stimuli, 92 subjects performed a combined cognitive and emotional Stroop task while oxygenation changes in the prefrontal cortex were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results showed a specific NPSR1 gene activation modulation in response to fear-relevant word stimuli. Only A-homozygotes displayed an emotional Stroop effect in terms of increased activation to fear-relevant stimuli in medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Specifically, activation in the fear-relevant condition was higher in A-homozygotes as compared to T allele carriers while no group differences were found during neutral, congruent or highly interfering incongruent color word presentation. The current results are in line with earlier imaging genetic studies and suggest a potential protective function of the NPSR1 rs324981 A/A genotype against pathologically enhanced anxiety that might be explained by stronger reflective prefrontal regulation over the subcortical fear response.