Emotional Stroop Task

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.