Comparing Emotional And Color Stroop Tasks For Inhibitory Processing

Color Stroop Task and Experimental Design

1. Comparison of inhibition in two times reaction tasks.
2. Lisa Cothran and Randy Larson.
3. Journal is “J Psychol”, Year of publication is July 2008, the Volume number is 142 and issue 4, Page numbers are 373-385.

1. Aim of the present research is examining the cross-task consistency of the ability to inhibit the processing of irrelevant information.
2. A color stroop task has color words presented in a congruent and incongruent format, where the participants are instructed to indicate the color while ignoring the word. (Bugg, & Hutchison, 2013)Similarly, in case of emotion Stroop task, emotive words are presented in varying colors and same instructions as that of the color task are provided. (Kiyonaga & Egner, 2014).

The research was conducted to examine if the inhibitory processing taking place in emotion Stroop and color Stroop are equivalent functionally.

1. The predictions were-

• The traditional Stroop effects.
• Correlation of interference scores.
• Physiological reactivity greater in experimental condition.

1. 32 undergraduate students.
2. An iMac computer and Superlab pro 1.75 was used for presentation of stimuli. Instructions, as given to the participants, were to indicate the color of the ink as fast as possible. Each block of the stimuli was separated by a “+” of about 350-ms in the center of the screen (blank). Rest for 2.5 minutes was provided after each block.  

Color word Stroop task had red, green, blue and yellow presented on a completely black background. Each block had 60 trials where the stimuli presentation was randomized with 15 repetitions of each color. Three experiments; blocks were designed, where, color patches were presented in block 1, incongruent word and color pairs were presented in block 2 and congruent word and color pairs were present in block 3.

Emotion Stroop task- Same colors on a white background were presented. Randomization and repetition were same as color stroop. 20 negatively valenced words, 20 neutral words, 20 positively valenced words and 20 neutral words were presented in block 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively. Each color and word were presented an equal number of times with each word presented in 3 colors of the 4, across the blocks.

1. The participants were randomly assigned to each of the two experimental conditions. Counterbalancing was used while presenting the Stroop tasks. Each stroop task had fixed presentation of blocks and in each block, stimuli were presented in a randomized manner. The participants were asked to sit down with pressure cuffs attached to their non-dominant arm and complete a non-related filler task. The baseline physiological data were recorded. Physiological data were recorded 1.5 min into each block of the first reaction time (RT) task. Same procedure for second RT task was followed. Finally, after a filler task, the baseline physiological data was recorded.

1. Emotional stroop task- A comparison of neutral and negative word conditions shows, the latter has lower error percentage, t(30)=3.5, p<0.001; and larger RTs, t(30)=-3.60, p<0.001. Therefore the effect of negative emotion is evident.

Color stroop task- A comparison of incongruent and congruent tasks show that incongruent condition has larger RTs, t(30)=9.4, p<0.001, suggesting stroop effect. The incongruent condition also had longer RTs than color patch condition, t(30)=4.4, p<0.001. No significant difference in terms of error percentage was found.

Physiological reactivity as defined by Cannon in 1932 is the bodily changes that occur as a response to stressful stimuli. The major features of physiological reactivity include increased heart rate and blood pressure (Badour & Feldner,  2013)

Neutral words had significantly more physiological reactivity in comparison to negative words, DBP t(29)= -2.49, p<0.01; HR t(29)=-2.54, p<0.01 in emotion stroop task. Color stroop task has shown significantly greater reactivity for the incongruent task in comparison to color patch task, t(29)=1.89, p<0.05.Across the two tasks, color stroop has shown more physiological reactivity in comparison to emotion stroop.

1. Eide et al. had examined test-retest reliability of emotion stroop tasks in 2002, the equivalence of inhibitory processing occurring in the two stroop tasks was speculated, however, that remained untested. It has been obtained from the present study that  the speculation is false.
2. Future research should try exploring the reactivity relationship among more similar tasks. Similar designs of IP tests might be more beneficial in terms of correlation, for instance examining IP across Affective Simeon Task and Color Stroop Task.
3. Case studies aim at analyzing certain issues that lie within the limitations of a specific situation, environment or organization (Soy, 2015). Explanatory case studies focus majorly on situations occurring within a real-life context, for instance, investigating reasons behind the global economic crisis. Descriptive case studies analyze the various sequence that takes place a while after some interpersonal events have occurred, for instance, a case study of McDonald’s in Indonesia to find out its impact on the amplifying levels of multiculturalism on various marketing practices. Exploratory case studies have the aim of answering questions like ‘what’ or ‘who’ and data collection questionnaires, experiments, interviews, for instance, conducting a study to find differences in teaching practices between public and private schools in Bloomington, USA (Thomas, 2015). Advantages of this method are that data collection and analysis is usually within the situational context, data analysis can integrate both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, capturing the various real-life complexities for in-depth studies are possible (Yin, 2017). Disadvantages of this method are that rigor may be lacking, numerous challenges can be associated with data analysis, major generalizations based on the findings cannot be made (Liamputtong, 2013).

I would rate the abstract  3, because, the given abstract has a short summary of the article and also contains some of the key points like the purpose of the study and results of the study but does not have the research design or hypothesis of the study. However, the content of the research is understandable from the given abstract.

• Journal:  “Cothran, D. L., & Larsen, R. (2008). Comparison of inhibition in two timed reaction tasks: The color and emotion Stroop tasks. The Journal of Psychology, 142(4), 373-385.”
• Coursebook:  “Zimbardo, P.G., Johnson, R.L., & McCann, V. (2009). Psychology: Core concepts (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc. – (PNIE Edition).”
• Another journal:  “Bugg, J. M., & Hutchison, K. A. (2013). Converging evidence for control of color–word Stroop interference at the item level. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(2), 433.”

References

Badour, C. L., & Feldner, M. T. (2013). Trauma-related reactivity and regulation of emotion: Associations with posttraumatic stress symptoms. Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry, 44(1), 69-76.

Bugg, J. M., & Hutchison, K. A. (2013). Converging evidence for control of color–word Stroop interference at the item level. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(2), 433.

Cothran, D. L., & Larsen, R. (2008). Comparison of inhibition in two timed reaction tasks: The color and emotion Stroop tasks. The Journal of Psychology, 142(4), 373-385.

Kiyonaga, A., & Egner, T. (2014). The working memory Stroop effect: when internal representations clash with external stimuli. Psychological science, 25(8), 1619-1629.

Liamputtong, P. (2013). Qualitative research methods.

Soy, S. (2015). The case study as a research method.

Yin, R. K. (2017). Case study research and applications: Design and methods. Sage publications.

Thomas, G. (2015). How to do your case study. Sage.