; PSY 1903
PSY 1903 Programming for Psychologists

Emotional Stroop Task - Guidelines

In the Emotional Stroop Task, participants are asked to name the color of words while ignoring their content.

The words are divided into emotional categories such as positive (e.g. smile), negative (e.g. agony), and neutral (e.g. short).

The task is designed to measure attentional biases towards emotional stimuli. Longer reaction times for identifying the color of emotional words compared to neutral words are considered a measure of emotional interference on cognitive control.

Demo

View run through of EST demo project...

Structure

Instead of general positive and negative words, you will come up with two specific emotions you wish to study, which we will describe as emotionA and emotionB.

For example, emotionA words might be calm, and emotionB words might be scary. (Do not use these examples as your categories).

You will have 3 blocks of trials:

  1. A practice block that consists of an independent list of neutral words
  2. An emotionA words block that consists of half emotionA and half neutral words
  3. An emotionB words block that consists of half emotionB and half neutral words

Across participants, block 1 will always come first and blocks 2 and 3 will come in a random order (e.g. sometimes 1,2,3, sometimes 1,3,2). This flow is set up for you in the conditions array described below...

Conditions

To structure your experiment, use the following conditions file: est-conditions.js (click Raw to see a version of the code you copy)

Here are the steps you should take to work with this file:

  1. Add it to your project and make sure it’s imported via your index.html file before experiment.js.
  2. Skim through the entire contents of the file to get a broad understanding of how it works.
  3. Load your project in the browser - you should see the resulting conditions array from that file output to the console. Carefully study the structure and data of the conditions array so you understand it, as you will be building your experiment around it.
  4. Update the top of the file with values that are applicable to your project. Refresh the browser as necessary to check the resulting array meets your expectations.

Once you have studied and modified the conditions file, you can move on to programming your experiment around it.

Mechanics

Between each block should be pause screen that lasts 1000ms, e.g.:

Between each word should be a fixation screen that lasts 250ms, e.g.: