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Reduced Stroop interference under stress: Decreased cue utilisation, not increased executive control
- Source :
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 72:1522-1529
- Publication Year :
- 2018
- Publisher :
- SAGE Publications, 2018.
-
Abstract
- Since the 1960s, researchers have been reporting that stress reduces Stroop interference. This is puzzling, as stress and anxiety typically have deleterious effects on cognitive control and performance. The traditional explanation is that stress reduces “cue utilisation”: It withdraws attentional resources from less relevant stimuli (including the distracter word), meaning that the target colour is left with a stronger influence over response selection. However, it could also be that stress somehow boosts distracter inhibition, or some other aspect of executive control. To test these two accounts, 59 students completed a Stroop task featuring occasional startlingly loud sounds (high stress) or the same sounds at a lower, comfortable volume (low stress). Alongside standard Stroop interference, two measures of executive control—negative priming and conflict adaptation—were calculated from the Stroop data. Stress produced a clear reduction of Stroop interference, but it did not influence negative priming, and no conflict adaptation effects were detected at all. These findings support the cue utilisation account. Furthermore, for the first time, stress was shown to reduce Stroop interference in a task with no congruent trials, showing that the effect does not result from stress’s modulating any strategy changes participants might make in response to congruent trials.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
BF Psychology
Physiology
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
behavioral disciplines and activities
050105 experimental psychology
Task (project management)
Executive Function
Young Adult
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Physiology (medical)
Stress (linguistics)
medicine
Humans
Attention
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Control (linguistics)
General Psychology
05 social sciences
Cognition
General Medicine
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Stroop Test
Negative priming
Anxiety
Female
Cues
medicine.symptom
Psychology
Priming (psychology)
Psychomotor Performance
Stress, Psychological
psychological phenomena and processes
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Stroop effect
Cognitive psychology
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 17470226 and 17470218
- Volume :
- 72
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....f79ac7617ac778624ba86db4eb23b713