The role of Stroop processes in the emotional Stroop effect was subjected to a conceptual scrutiny augmented by a series of experiments entailing reading or lexical decision as well as color naming. The analysis showed that the Stroop effect is not defined in the emotional Stroop task. The experiments showed that reading, lexical decision, and color naming all are slower with emotional words and that this delay is immune to task-irrelevant variation and to changes in the relative salience of the words and the colors. The delay was absent when emotional and neutral words appeared in a single block. A threat-driven generic slowdown is implicated, not a selective attention mechanism associated with the classic Stroop effect.

The goal of avoiding distraction (e.g., ignoring words when naming their print colors in a Stroop task) is opposed intrinsically by the penchant to process conspicuous and correlated characteristics of the environment (e.g., noticing trial-to-trial associations between the colors and the words). To reconcile these opposing forces, the authors propose a tectonic theory of selective attention in which 2 memory-based structures--dimensional imbalance and dimensional uncertainty--drive selection by processing salient, surprising, and/or correlated information contained within and across stimulus dimensions. Each structure modulates the buildup of excitation to targets and the buildup of inhibition to distractors and to memories of previous stimuli. Tectonic theory is implemented to simulate the impact of 4 types of context on the presence, magnitude, and direction of congruity effects and task effects in the Stroop paradigm. The tectonic model is shown to surpass other formal models in explaining the range and diversity of Sroop effects.

Three influential perspectives of social cognition entail conflicting predictions regarding the selectivity of performance under stress. According to the attention view, selectivity to the task-relevant attribute improves under stress because of reduced utilization of task-irrelevant attributes. According to the capacity-resource approach, stress depletes attentional resources wherefore selectivity fails for all but chronically accessible information. A third perspective, ironic process theory, similarly holds that selective attention fails under stress but adds that task-irrelevant information is rendered hyperaccessible. The theoretical derivations were tested in a series of experiments using 2 classes of selectivity measures, with special care taken to control for hitherto neglected factors of context The results showed that the selectivity of attention improved under stress, consistent with the prediction of the attention view.

A picture-word version of the Stroop task was used to test the automatic activation of words carrying various senses of psychological distance: temporal (tomorrow, in a year), social (friend, enemy), and hypotheticality (sure, maybe). The pictures implied depth with the words appearing relatively close or distant from the observer. The participants classified the spatial distance of words faster when the word's implicit psychological distance matched their spatial distance (e.g., a geographically close word was classified faster when it was 'friend' than when it was 'enemy'). The findings are consistent with the notion that psychological distance is accessed automatically, even when it is not directly related to people's current goals, and suggest that psychological distance is an important dimension of meaning, common to spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. KeywordsConstrual level; word-picture Stroop paradigm; psychological distance; automatic activation Consider the four contrasts: here -there, tomorrow -in a year, we -others, and certainmaybe. What do these four pairs have in common? According to Construal Level Theory (CLT, Liberman, Trope & Stephan, in press; Trope & Liberman, 2003), each of these pairs forms a continuum that denotes a different dimension of psychological distance. Psychological distance refers to the distance of a stimulus (object or event) from the perceiver's direct experience. The four dimensions are: (1) spatial -how distal in space is the stimulus from the perceiver; (2) temporal -how much time (past or future) separates the perceiver's present time and the target event; (3) social -how distinct is a social object from the perceiver's self (e.g., self vs. others, friend vs. stranger) and (4) hypotheticality -how likely is the target event to happen (or an object to exist), or how close it is to the perceiver's reality. According to CLT, values on these dimensions are related to psychological distance and thus have a shared meaning. The present research investigates whether this shared meaning is automatically accessed when people encounter values on these dimensions (e.g., whether the stimulus "tomorrow" activates meaning of psychological proximity). NIH Public Access

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