Stroop Effect: Anxiety vs. Relaxation

General Discussion

The first study that was conducted by Becker at al. (2001) is based on the hypothesis of general emotionality and schema congruency. The result supported was stated that patients with general anxiety disorder have general attentional bias while patients with social phobia have selective attentional bias, also known as schema congruency. The second study that was conducted by Eschenbeck at al. (2004) is based on the theory about processing bias. According to the result of the experiment, high anxious children have more Stroop interference and higher error rates during the threatening stimuli compared to other groups in the experiment. The final study that has a strong connection with my study compared to other studies, it was conducted by Gilboa-Schechtman at al. (2000). Their study is based on the hypothesis about emotionality, mood congruence, and concern relevance. The result of the study indicated that higher interference in mood congruence and concern relevance stimuli. There weren’t any noticeable interference in the emotionality stimuli. So therefore, the result only supported two of three hypotheses. The mood induction procedures do affect the participants’ Stroop task. Overall, putting all of those studies together and supporting the main theory, which is that people with general anxiety would have higher Stroop interference and error rates compared to those with medium and low anxiety.

In my study, my partners and I did similar method from previous study. The big idea of the study is find the effects of emotion state of the participants by doing the mood induction and time their reaction time on a Stroop task. However, the result was different. We did two mood induction procedures on college student: Anxiety and Relaxation. There are ten participants involve in the experiment and we had them to relive their anxiety experience that can induce their anxiety emotion and then did the Stroop task. Once they’re done, they did the second condition, which is to relive their relaxation experience that would induce their relaxation emotion and did the Stroop task again that’s the same as first part. After completing the study, my partners and I collected the data and turn out that the result was different from what we assumed. The relaxation mood induction has higher Stroop interference than anxiety mood induction. We believe that it was due to having bias in the experiment such as American Sign Language translation, color blind, misunderstanding the meaning of anxiety, and reading level within the deaf participants.