Emotional Stroop task article review
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The article “Emotional Stroop task: Effect of word arousal and subject anxiety on emotional interference” by Desler, Mériau, Heekeren and van der Meer examines how the emotional Stroop experiment is used to explore the aspect of arousal and other stimuli to individuals. The authors introduce the article by providing literature on how the emotional stop experiment has been used over the years to examine different emotional stimuli to individuals. Through the examination of the various researches undertaken on the subject, the process is considered to develop emotional bias due to the interference experienced by the individuals conducting the task. Due to this reason, the experiment is instrumental in the investigation of intentional bias. It is stated that up to date, it has never been clear on what determines explicitly interference between valence and the emotional arousal of the material used. Despite the lack of clarity, the authors state that it is evident that the level of arousal matters most in the production of emotional interference as compared to the valence of emotional stimuli. Therefore, the article investigated whether the intervention was caused by word arousal or word valence.
To undertake the study, the authors utilized fifty university students who were either conducting undergraduate or graduate studies. Among the students, 30 were female while the rest were male. The research used the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) to examine the differences in the state and the trait anxiety of the students. In the process, the researches undertook a picot study of 300 nouns that were rated using the seven-point rating scale based on valence and arousal. The emotional and neutral words were then classified using colours like red, yellow, green and blue, where the luminance was comparable. Through the use of four keys in a standard computer, the subject was supposed to indicate the ink colour by ignoring the meaning of the word. The words were displayed until the subject made a response. The process was undertaken twice to every subject as the terms were presented in a pseudo-randomized manner in four blocks of neutral, positive and negative words.
To obtain valid results, the researchers eliminated the colour-naming errors and reaction times of more than two SDs from the subject’s mean. Further analysis using ANOVA indicated that the reaction times of the subjects were influenced by the experimental conditions where the emotional words elicited longer reaction times as compared to neutral times. It was also discovered that the reaction time in the negative and positive words did not differ leading to an equal level of arousal. Regression results indicated that individual differences in anxiety influenced emotional interference, while the trait anxiety did not. The recall and recognition scores showed that the positive and negative words had an equal level of arousal. Such words were easily recalled as compared to neutral words.
In the discussion part, the researchers state that the study was consistent with the effect sizes experienced in previous research meta-analysis. It is also considered that the study added to the existing evidence that emotional interference is as a result of arousal and not valence. Through the study, it was also found that the results were against the negativity theory, which states that only the negative stimuli attract attention. This aspect was evident through the results, which showed that both unpleasant and pleasant pictures developed arousal. Also, the arousal levels were discovered to vary based on the nature of the picture predicting the interference effect, which was considered to reflect on the increased allocation of attentional resources to stimuli. The study also experienced the emotional memory effect enhancement through the recall process. Highly arousal words were associated with high memory of the words. It was concluded that valence and arousal influence the memory encoding process despite the differences in which the aspects are mediated.
Reference
Dresler, T., Mériau, K., Heekeren, H. R., & van der Meer, E. (2009). Emotional Stroop task: effect of word arousal and subject anxiety on emotional interference. Psychological Research PRPF, 73(3), 364-371.
