A Rational Look at the Emotional Stroop Phenomenon: A Generic Slowdown, Not a Stroop Effect.

Abstract

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.

When a bang makes you run away: Spatial avoidance of threatening environmental sounds

“…1 The main significant effects were type of emotional pair, F(2,90) = 6.807, p < .005, partial Á 2 = .131, and probe location, F(1,45) = 17.165, p < .001, partial Á 2 = .276. Taboo pairs led to longer RTs than negative pairs (262 vs. 255 ms), p < .001, and participants localized faster right than left beeps (255 vs. 263 ms).…”

“…Pairwise comparisons adjusted for multiple comparisons 1 Since no interaction involving gender was significant (all p > .35), we did not consider this factor in the analyses. using a Bonferroni correction (˛ = .0125) revealed that participants localized faster right than left beeps with left taboo or negative sounds, t(45) = 5.090 and 3.974, both p < .001, not with right ones, t(45) = 1.269, p > .10 and t < 1.…”

“…Hence, both verbal and nonverbal taboo stimuli most probably elicit a freezing reaction [1], namely an inhibition of motor responses, creating a generic slowdown. This would be mainly due to their shock/surprise value, not to their disgusting trait or negative valence.…”

Common regions of dorsal anterior cingulate and prefrontal–parietal cortices provide attentional control of distracters varying in emotionality and visibility

“…Indeed, it could be argued that the failure to see dACC activity in emotional Stroop paradigms (e.g., Whalen et al, 1998) reflects the absence of response conflict between the emotional distracters and the target stimuli (cf. Algom et al, 2004). When the emotional distracters are response competitors with the target stimuli, dACC activity can be seen (Etkin et al, 2006;Haas et al, 2006).…”

“…Thus, two reviews of the emotional Stroop literature report that significant emotional interference is only shown by clinical populations, not by healthy comparison individuals (Bar-Haim et al, 2007;Williams et al, 1996). Indeed, there have been suggestions that distracters will only cause interference in emotional Stroop paradigms if they are response competitors for the target words (Algom et al, 2004;cf. Etkin et al, 2006;Haas et al, 2006).…”