The Research On The Life-Span Development Of The Emotional Stroop Effect

Cognition and emotion are the basic functions of human beings’minds, it was the interest in the relationship between cognition and emotion that created Emotional Stroop task. Just like in the classic Stroop task, in the Emotional Stroop task, people name the print color of words, but the carrier words are not color words. The carrier words are emotionally charged words, threat words, or words related to the pathology of clinical patients, as well as neutral words. The Emotional Stroop effect is the slowdown in naming the color of the emotional words compared with the naming speed of the neutral words, In the beginning, the emotional Stroop effect was considered as a test of attentional bias in psychopathology, but now more and more people argued that it can’t test attentional bias in controlled group. In order to understand the life-span development characteristics and the mechanism of the Emotional Stroop effect, the study adopted two experiments to answer these questions.In the first experiment, pictures and words with different valences were adopted in the blocked design. When the participants finished the Emotional Stroop tasks, they were asked to recall the words and pictures which appeared in the Emotional Stroop task. The participants included48pupils in Grade Two,48pupils in Grade Five,48college students,29older adults (55years old above). The result indicated that negative and positive pictures can produce Emotional Stroop Effect in the four age groups, and three kinds of pictures were recalled differently in number except the older participants. The order in the three younger age groups was just as follows: negative>positive>neutral. Inconsistent results were obtained among four age groups in Emotional Stroop task with words. Emotional Stroop Effect with negative words was obtained only in the college students, and the Facilitate Effect with the positive words was obtained only in the early puberty. There were not any effect found in children and older participants. Three kinds of words were recalled differently in number except in the children group, the order in the other three age groups was just as follows: negative>positive、neutral, there was no significant difference between the number of positive words and that of neutral words.In the second experiment, the same stimuli were adopted in the random mixed design. When people finished the Emotional Stroop task, they were asked to recall the words and pictures which appeared in the Emotional Stroop task. The participants included48college students. The result indicated that neither words nor pictures produced the Emotional Stroop Effect. The number of the recalled stimulus was the same as that in the first experiment.The life-span development characteristics of emotional information processing were discussed later. And the life-span development characteristics supported the hypothesis.The results of the two experiments were compared to reveal the mechanism underlying the Emotional Stroop Effect. The combination of the slow effect and fast effect may be the origin of the Emotional Stroop Effect with negative materials, and the slow effect was the primary origin. There was not slow effect in positive materials, so the fast effect may be the origin of the Emotional Stroop Effect.