Compare methods

	Emotional Stroop Task	Sequential Priming
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1986
Originator	Emotion-cognition tradition (modified from Stroop); MacLeod and colleagues	Social cognition priming tradition (Fazio and colleagues)
Type	Reaction-time interference paradigm	General reaction-time priming framework
Seminal source	MacLeod, C., Mathews, A., & Tata, P. (1986). Attentional bias in emotional disorders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 15-20.	Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 229-238.
Aliases	Emotional Interference Task, Affective Stroop, Modified Stroop Task	Prime-Target Priming, Semantic-Affective Priming, Response-Window Priming
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Sequential priming is the general experimental framework underlying many implicit social-cognition measures: a prime is presented, followed after some interval by a target to which the participant responds, and the speed of responding reveals what the prime automatically activated. By varying the prime-target relation (semantic, affective, stereotypic, goal-related) and the stimulus onset asynchrony, researchers can map which associations are activated, how quickly, and whether the activation is automatic or strategic. Short intervals isolate automatic spreading activation that participants cannot control, while longer intervals permit controlled processes. Evaluative priming, affective priming, and stereotype priming are all special cases of this logic, making sequential priming a unifying methodological backbone for studying automatic mental processes in social psychology.