A number of studies have compared emotionally impacted and emotionally intact participants with regards to the time taken to name colors of negative words compared to neutral and positive items. The interpretations of both the color Stroop and the emotional Stroop tests imply the suppression of responses to distracting word information. In the work of Gotlib and McCann (1984), the emotional variant of the Stroop task
illustrated that clinically depressed participants Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical were slower to name the color of depressing words compared to nondepressing words due to difficulty GS-9973 supplier inhibiting rumination triggered by negative words. This finding was replicated in a sample of sad-induced participants (Gilboa-Schechtman et al. 2000).
It is noteworthy to mention the Stroop paradigm is limited insofar as attention is conceptualized as a single process, when in fact attentional processes include both engagement (excitation) and disengagement (inhibition), that are not Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical easily disentangled by the Stroop task (Kahneman and Treisman 1984). Nonetheless, it continues to be a useful tool in examining attentional interference for mood-relevant content. Once again, with respect to mood research, some studies have found mood-congruency effects whereby individuals in a sad mood take longer to attend to depressive stimuli compared to happy mood individuals (Bower and Forgas Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 2001), whereas others have not found this bias (Bouhuys et al. 1997) in sad mood. Specifically, Stroop interference has been observed for sad words after sad mood induction in one study (Gilboa-Schechtman et al. 2000), but not in another (Perez et al. 1999). According to Chepenik et al. (2007), the literature contains relatively few Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical studies on the impact of sad mood on cognitive processes other than memory with reported sad mood effects
on facial emotion recognition and attention being relatively scarce. Although most recently research has shown mood-congruent effects for facial expressions in sad mood (Schmid and Schmid-Mast 2010). The main purpose of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the present study was to examine attentional interference among participants in a sad mood state by determining interference for mood-congruent stimuli (e.g., sad faces) and mafosfamide to establish whether this interference has a common mechanism influencing both emotional words and emotional faces. This research sought to examine both emotional words and emotional faces across four principal emotions to address as closely as possible, what captures the attention of people in a sad mood compared to those in a happy mood. Bearing this in mind, we specifically intended to evaluate attentional interference for the most socially salient of pictorial images: emotional faces. The inclusion of both sad and angry facial emotions will allow us to investigate if sad-induced participants have a mood-congruent bias for sad faces alone or a bias for negative faces in general (sad and angry faces).