Emotional Stroop Test

The Emotional Stroop Test measures how much emotionally charged words capture attention and slow a simple colour-naming response.

On every trial a word is shown in one of four ink colours and you name the ink colour as fast as you can, ignoring the word itself. Half the words are emotion words (for example danger or grief); the other half are neutral words matched for length and familiarity (for example table or window). The two kinds of trials are mixed together.

The emotional-interference effect is your mean colour-naming reaction time on emotion words minus your mean reaction time on neutral words, in milliseconds. A positive value means emotion words slowed you down — a small attentional "snag" on emotional content. An accuracy cost (neutral accuracy minus emotion accuracy) is reported alongside it.

The word list is deliberately mild, but some words name unpleasant states. The effect is reported within-person: no population norm, percentile, or T-score is applied. Results are indicative of one session, not diagnostic, and are sensitive to sleep, caffeine, and distraction.

These figures describe this respondent's own within-session performance — reaction-time differences and accuracy across conditions. Where a published reference distribution exists, a percentile within that sample is shown alongside the raw value; otherwise only the raw effect is reported.

• Williams, J. M. G., Mathews, A., & MacLeod, C. (1996). The emotional Stroop task and psychopathology. Psychological Bulletin, 120(1), 3–24.
• Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(6), 643–662.