Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Aug:53:99-104.
doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.010. Epub 2017 Jun 24.

An emotional Stroop task with faces and words. A comparison of young and older adults

Ana I Agustí  1 , Encarnación Satorres  2 , Alfonso Pitarque  3 , Juan C Meléndez  4
Affiliations

An emotional Stroop task with faces and words. A comparison of young and older adults

Ana I Agustí et al. Conscious Cogn. 2017 Aug.

Abstract

Antecedents: Given the contradictions of previous studies on the changes in attentional responses produced in aging a Stroop emotional task was proposed to compare young and older adults to words or faces with an emotional valence.

Method: The words happy or sad were superimposed on faces that express the emotion of happiness or sadness. The emotion expressed by the word and the face could agree or not (cued and uncued trials, respectively). 85 young and 66 healthy older adults had to identify both faces and words separately, and the interference between the two types of stimuli was examined.

Results: An interference effect was observed for both types of stimuli in both groups. There was more interference on positive faces and words than on negative stimuli.

Conclusions: Older adults had more difficulty than younger in focusing on positive uncued trials, whereas there was no difference across samples on negative uncued trials.

Keywords: Aging; Faces; Interference; Stroop; Words.

PubMed Disclaimer

Publication types