The Influence of Happiness and Anxiety on Emotional Stroop Effect

NRU Higher School of Economics , 2022. No. 131.

Martynova E., Shakirova S. A., Lyusin D.

The main aim of this study was to examine how happiness and anxiety influence emotional Stroop effect. According to the principle of emotion congruence, information processing is facilitated if its emotional tone matches an individual’s mood. The first hypothesis suggested that emotional Stroop effect would be greater with stimuli incongruent with a participant’s emotional state. The second hypothesis was based on two theories; the broaden-and-build theory predicting that happiness makes attention broader, and Attentional Control Theory predicting that anxiety impairs inhibition. Hence, it was suggested that emotional Stroop effect would be smaller in the happy state compared to neutral and anxious states. We used an emotional Stroop task with neutral, happy, and threatening words, music for mood induction, and the EmoS-15 questionnaire to estimate the effectiveness of mood induction. The first hypothesis was partly confirmed. Emotional Stroop effect estimated in error rates was greater for stimuli incongruent with emotional states, although this effect did not reach the conventional level of statistical significance. The second hypothesis was not confirmed. The size of emotional Stroop effect did not depend on participants’ emotional states.

Keywords: внимание, attention, тревога, anxiety, эмоции, emotions, радость, happiness, emotional Stroop effect, индукция эмоций, эмоциональный эффект Струпа, mood induction

Publication based on the results of: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processes in Cognitive Tasks and Emotional/Social Cognition (2022)