Compare methods

	Dot-Probe Task	Emotional Stroop Task
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1986
Originator	Colin MacLeod, Andrew Mathews & Philip Tata	Emotion-cognition tradition (modified from Stroop); MacLeod and colleagues
Type	Reaction-time attentional bias paradigm	Reaction-time interference paradigm
Seminal source	MacLeod, C., Mathews, A., & Tata, P. (1986). Attentional bias in emotional disorders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 15-20.	MacLeod, C., Mathews, A., & Tata, P. (1986). Attentional bias in emotional disorders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 15-20.
Aliases	Visual Probe Task, Attentional Bias Task, MacLeod Probe Task	Emotional Interference Task, Affective Stroop, Modified Stroop Task
Related	3	3
Summary	The dot-probe task, introduced by MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata in 1986, measures selective attention to emotional information. On each trial two stimuli -- typically one threatening and one neutral word or image -- appear simultaneously in different screen locations; they then disappear and a probe (a dot or small symbol) appears in the location previously occupied by one of them. Participants respond to the probe as fast as possible. If attention was already drawn to the threatening stimulus, probes appearing in its location are detected faster, yielding an attentional-bias score from the difference in reaction times. The task gave attentional bias an objective, behavioral operationalization and became the dominant paradigm in anxiety and emotion research, as well as a target for attention-bias-modification interventions.	The emotional Stroop task adapts the classic color-word Stroop to measure attentional capture by emotional content. Participants name the ink color of words as quickly as possible while ignoring the words' meanings; some words are emotionally salient (for example threat words for anxious individuals or drug words for users) and others are neutral. When color-naming is slower for emotional than for neutral words, this interference indicates that the emotional meaning automatically drew processing resources away from the color task. Because the slowdown tracks an individual's concerns -- spider words for spider-phobics, body-shape words for people with eating disorders -- the emotional Stroop became a widely used index of content-specific attentional bias and emotional preoccupation in clinical and social psychology.