The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content

Abstract

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The difference shows that people are affected by the emotional content conveyed by the carrier words even though they are irrelevant to the color-naming task at hand. The ESE has been widely deployed with patient populations, as well as with non-selected populations, because the emotion words can be selected to match the tested pathology. The ESE is a powerful tool, yet it is vulnerable to various threats to its validity. This report refers to potential sources of confounding and includes a modal experiment that provides the means to control for them. The most prevalent threat to the validity of existing ESE studies is sustained effects and habituation wrought about by repeated exposure to emotion stimuli. Consequently, the order of exposure to emotion and neutral stimuli is of utmost importance. We show that in the standard design, only one specific order produces the ESE.

The Association Between Suicidal Behavior, Attentional Control, and Frontal Asymmetry

“…This pattern was found for all three types of words (positive, negative, and neutral) and would indicate that those reporting high levels of suicidal behavior are able to inhibit irrelevant information more effectively than those reporting low levels. The overall lack of any emotional Stroop effect within this task is also inconsistent with past findings showing that response times in an emotional Stroop task are generally slower to emotional words compared with neutral words ( 34 , 35 ). It may be proposed that individuals with a high risk of suicidal behavior are slower to inhibit irrelevant information at a general level, yet when presented with emotional stimuli they may act more quickly and somewhat impulsively (this would be supported by the speed-accuracy trade-off whereby the high-risk group sacrificed accuracy for faster responses).…”

“…In general, studies show that responses are slower to incongruent trials compared with congruent trials in a standard color Stroop, revealing difficulties inhibiting the automatic processing of irrelevant information [known as the Stroop interference effect ( 33 )]. Responses are also slower to emotional words compared with neutral words in an emotional Stroop task [also known as the emotional Stroop effect ( 34 – 36 )]. This is particularly the case in patient groups when the emotional words are related to affective disorders [e.g., Ref.…”

Evidence for different types of errors being associated with different types of post-error changes

“…Although greater post-error accuracy under speed rather than accuracy emphasis is consistent with the standard cognitive control account, at the very least our findings suggests the account is incomplete. One possible explanation is that the negative affect experienced following an error reduces accuracy because it takes away attentional resources from processing on the subsequent trial (Ben-Haim et al, 2016). To the degree that the disappointment caused by an error is greater under accuracy emphasis this could also explain the associated decrease in accuracy relative to the speed emphasis condition.…”

Cognitive reserve-mediated neural modulation of emotional control and regulation in people with late-life depression

“…Specifically, we hypothesized that the known adverse age-related psychiatric symptoms and cognitive impairment would be attenuated among individuals with higher CR who suffer from LLD. The cognitive and neural processes of emotional-cognitive control were assessed using the emotional Stroop (eStroop) task, which heavily taps into selective attention, inhibition of emotional responses and conflict resolution (Dalgleish & Watts, 1990; Williams et al ., 1996; Ben-Haim et al ., 2016; Song et al ., 2017). Individuals with LLD showed altered emotion-related activities in prefrontal-ACC-insula circuitries, and this has been identified as reflecting aberrant cognitive control mechanisms for processing emotional information (Fales et al ., 2008, 2009; Frodl, 2016).…”