Event Abstract

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

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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