The emotional Stroop-task: towards uncovering emotional picture-word interference
Year: 2008
Type: report
Abstract: This report is an exploration of the emotional (affective) picture-word variant of the well-known Stroop-task, The Stroop concept is that human information processing takes longer when conflicting (emotional) information is presented. By measuring reaction-times in well-controlled experiments, it offers a relatively simple and objectiveway to probe the human mind. An experiment was conducted in which 8participants were presented with emotionally charged images and superimposed words. The emotional content of words and picture was varied to offer matching (congruent) and unmatching (incongruent) pairs. Participants were asked to perform two tasks: 1. Name the word orpicture; here, words were named faster than pictures. The expectation that an affect-incongruent word influenced the naming of a picture was not confirmed. 2. Categorize (positive or negative) the wordor picture.; here pictures were categorized faster than words. Theexpectation that an emotionally-incongruent picture influenced the categorization of a word was not confirmed. An expected negativity effect on all conditions except word naming was also not found. The results support the distinction between a lexical system and a semantic system but the expectations about the influence of congruencycould not be confirmed.- An exact replication of the results of De Houwer and Hermans(1994) did not occur. Still, this (smaller) study shows enough promise to proceed with defining a larger study, guidedby its results.
Author: Sutmuller, A.D.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2128142981