Emotional Stroop Task - English Version

The Emotional Stroop is an experimental task created by Williams, Mathews, and MacLeod (1996) that is based on Stroop's original Stroop task (1935). Individuals were asked to identify the color of the words an emotional or a neutral word shown in a different color without paying attention to the meaning of the word in this test. Individuals display an attentional bias towards emotional words when they take longer to name the color of the letters of an emotional stimulus than a neutral stimulus, a phenomenon known as the interference effect. In determining the words used in the Emotional Stroop Task, this study referred to the CEFI (Concreteness, Emotion, and Subjective Frequency Norms for Indonesian Words) database by Sianipar, van Groenestijn, and Dijkstra (2016). Our word stimuli were selected based on three dimensions: familiarity, valence, and arousal. The experimental stimulus words were chosen by calculating the mean of each word and finding the cut-off point for each dimension in splitting the words into three groups (positive, negative, and neutral words). The cut-off point is determined as a control so that each word category has an equivalent dimension value. For each word utilized as a stimulus in the experiment, this study established the cut-off point for mean familiarity in the range of 4.00-7.39. The valence mean used in this study were >5.5 for positive words, <4 for negative words, and 4.5 < x < 5.0 for neutral words. Finally, in calculating the arousal mean, emotional words must have a greater arousal value than neutral words. Therefore, while positive and negative words have a mean arousal of 5.72 and 5.71 (p > .05), the neutral words have a mean arousal of 4.34 (all ps < .05). In this experiment, the stimuli comprised 120 words, with 40 words in each dimension, namely positive, negative, and neutral words. The words were then randomly assigned to four blocks in the experiment. The Emotional Stroop Task is carried out online and created using the OpenSesame software version 3.3.10 and uploaded on the Mind Probe platform (https://jatos.mindprobe.eu/jatos).