The Emotional Stroop Task in Anxious Children

Abstract

The emotional Stroop task in anxious childrenNightingale, Z.C.; Field, A.P.; Kindt, M.

Vicarious learning of children’s social-anxiety-related fear beliefs and emotional Stroop bias.

“…In contrast, the word and its color appear in the same location at the same time in the emotional Stroop task and hence attention is divided cognitively but not physically. Thus when word meaning interferes with color naming in the Stroop task this is more accurately a measure of emotional interference in processing than attentional bias (Nightingale et al, 2010).…”

“…Stroop interference effects are often interpreted in the literature as an example of attentional bias to threat, but more likely represent threat-related mental preoccupation or processing bias (Bögels & Mansell, 2004;Nightingale et al, 2010). An attentional bias procedure such as the dot probe task involves initial orientation towards a cue followed by timed orientation towards a target stimulus that is in the same or different location as the cue.…”

“…It is also known that adults can acquire emotional Stroop bias during vicarious learning events in which a model is observed experiencing mock panic attacks (Kelly & Forsyth, 2007). Further, the emotional Stroop task has already been used successfully with children in the age group under investigation here (see Nightingale et al, 2010 for a review); for example, 6-to 12-year-olds with social concerns show Stroop interference effects for socially threatening (angry) faces compared with neutral faces (Hadwin et al, 2009). Therefore, an emotional Stroop task was used in the current study to measure Stroop interference for social performance anxiety-related words following social vicarious learning: Increased Stroop interference following learning would indicate that emotional Stroop bias can be vicariously learnt in childhood and rule out a demand characteristics explanation for increases in social fear beliefs.…”

“…Stroop interference is believed to occur when automatic processing of threatening words reduces the speed of color naming (Watts, McKenna, Sharrock & Trezise, 1986). Stroop bias is frequently described as attentional bias (e.g., Williams et al, 1996) but other authors have argued that the task cannot distinguish between selective attention, inhibitive emotional responses, mental preoccupation, or cognitive avoidance for Stroop words (Bögels & Mansell, 2004), so is perhaps best thought of simply as a processing bias (Nightingale, Field & Kindt, 2010). The emotional Stroop task is argued to be a useful measure of psychopathology (e.g., Williams et al, 1996) and evidence suggests that, for example, adults with social anxiety show a Stroop processing bias for socially threatening stimuli (see Bögels & Mansell, 2004;Ledley & Heimberg, 2006, for reviews).…”

Maternal and paternal influences on the developmental trajectory of childhood anxiety symptoms: a genetically sensitive investigation

“…Some moderation theories, such as Kindt's inhibition model (Kindt & van den Hout, 2001) suggest that the moderation (or inhibition) of selective attention to threat may occur as late as 10 years old. Although support for this model is equivocal (for a review, see Nightingale, Field, & Kindt, 2010) it does raise the possibility that a three year longitudinal study during preschool is too short to capture the critical points of change of the growth curve (and, therefore, the inherited and parental anxiety influence upon it). This would also explain the differences to Eley, et al (2015), whose sample of offspring were considerably older (11 to 22) than ours.…”