Data from: Viewing images of snakes accelerates making judgments of their color in humans: red snake effect as an instance of ‘emotional Stroop facilitation’

One of the most prevalent current psychobiological notions about human behaviour and emotion suggests that prioritization of threatening stimuli processing induces deleterious effects on task performance. In order to confirm its relevancy, 108 adults and 25 children were required to name the colour of images of snakes and flowers, using the pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm. When reaction time to answer the colour of each stimulus was measured, its value was found to decrease when snake images were presented when compared with when flower images were presented. Thus, contrary to the expectation from previous emotional Stroop paradigm research, emotions evoked by viewing images of snakes as a biologically relevant threatening stimulus were found to be likely to exert a facilitating rather than interfering effect on making judgements of their colour.

当前关于人类行为与情绪的主流心理生物学理论之一提出，优先加工威胁性刺激会对任务表现产生损害性影响。为验证该理论的适用性，研究招募了108名成年人与25名儿童，采用图片版情绪斯特鲁普范式（pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm），要求被试对蛇与花朵的图片进行颜色命名。当测量每个刺激的颜色命名反应时后发现，相较于花朵图片，呈现蛇类图片时被试的反应时更短。因此，与此前情绪斯特鲁普范式研究的预期相悖，本研究发现，将蛇类图片视作具有生物学相关性的威胁性刺激所唤起的情绪，反而对颜色判断任务起到了促进而非干扰作用。