No abstract

The relative contributions of slow and fast (online) components in a modified emotional Stroop task were evaluated. The slow component, neglected in previous research, was shown to lead to the prediction of a reversed emotional intrusion effect using pseudorandomly mixed negative and neutral stimuli. This prediction was supported in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, a new paradigm was developed that allowed a more direct observation of the nature of disruptive effects from negative stimuli. The results provided a clear demonstration of the presence of the slow component. The fast component, which has generally been assumed to be the source of the interference, was shown, in fact, to have little or no role in the disruption.

The role of intrusive cognitions was investigated using the emotional Stroop effect, in which irrelevant threat-related words interfered more with color naming than neutral words. In Experiment 1, the emotional Stroop effect decreased over blocks, indicating habituation. In Experiment 2, the interference persisted when different words were used in each block, suggesting that the habituation occurred at the level of the individual stimulus. However, there was some evidence for a decline in interference, suggesting some category-based habituation.

No abstract

In this study, four components of the Stroop effect were examined for manual word and vocal responses. The components were lexical, semantic relatedness, semantic relevance, and response set membership. The results showed that all four components were present in the vocal response task. However, in the manual word response task, the only component that produced significant interference on its own was response set membership. These results do not support predictions made by recent translation models (see W. R. Glaser & M. O. Glaser [1989] and Sugg & McDonald [1994]). A possible solution was suggested that located two sites for Stroop interference. The lexical, semantic relatedness, and semantic relevance effects were located in the lexical system, whereas the response set membership effect was located at a response selection stage.