Stronger Stroop effect from fearful faces shows automatic processing differences on a face-word task
-
1
Department of Psychological Science, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, Australia
Aim: Emotion and language expression are basic elements of communication. Research suggests a hierarchy of emotions with different strengths of automatic emotional processing between emotions (e.g., Beal & Herbert, 2008). The aim of this study was to investigate differences in automatic emotional processing between happy and fearful words and faces. Method: Thirty six participants (18 female) completed a laptop face-word Stroop experiment. Happy and fearful-related words were superimposed across faces expressing positive (happy) and negative (fearful) emotions. Participants categorised the face and word stimuli as either happy or fearful in two tasks, a facial expression task and a word emotion task. In the facial expression task, congruent and incongruent words acted as the distractors, and in the word expression task, congruent and incongruent faces were the distractors. Results: A Stroop-like effect was found in both the facial expression and word emotion categorisation tasks, as participants responded faster to happy compared to fearful faces/words. Larger interference effects occurred during the word emotion than the facial expression task, which indicates that affective faces are processed more automatically than affective words. In the word focus task, when happy words were presented with fearful faces as a distractor, fearful facial expressions had an interference effect (34 ms). The happy faces had a smaller interference effect on responses to the fearful words (15 ms). Conclusion: There were larger interference effects for affective judgements of words than facial expressions. This indicates that affective faces, in particular fearful faces, are processed more automatically than affective words. When the strength of positive and negative expressions is compared, fearful expressions resulted in a larger interference effect than happy expressions.
Keywords:
Stroop,
Automatic Processing,
face-word,
emotion,
happy,
fearful,
Response Time
Conference:
15th Annual Psychology Honours Research Conference , Coffs Harbour, Australia, 4 Oct - 5 Oct, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Research
Topic:
Abstract for 15th Annual Psychology Honours Research Conference
Citation:
Graham
M and
Winskel
H
(2019). Stronger Stroop effect from fearful faces shows automatic processing differences on a face-word task.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
15th Annual Psychology Honours Research Conference .
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.74.00008
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
18 Sep 2018;
Published Online:
27 Sep 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Matthew Graham, Department of Psychological Science, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, Australia, m.graham.13@student.scu.edu.au