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PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

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greatly diminish or disappear with mixed lists of neutral and concern-related<br />

stimuli (Waters & Feyerabend, 2000). It has been argued that there may be<br />

carry-over effects in the blocked Stroop task where participants ruminate about<br />

previous words as they continue to colour-name target items later in the<br />

sequence. These carry-over effects in blocks with concern-related words may<br />

increase the size of the Stroop effect in blocked versions of the stroop (see<br />

Waters et al., 2003). Waters et al (2003) demonstrated carry-over effects in a<br />

Stroop task with smokers where the concern-related words were about<br />

smoking.<br />

An alternative interpretation of this emotional Stroop effect is that<br />

emotional words automatically attract attention, distracting the participant from<br />

the colour-naming task and therefore increasing the time required to name the<br />

colour of the emotional words, relative to the neutral words. McKenna &<br />

Sharma (2004) used a Stroop-like task to investigate the intrusion of emotion<br />

on cognitive processing. They investigated a fast interference effect described<br />

as interference of emotion with the response within the trial of a threatening<br />

stimulus (the theory that emotional words automatically attract attention which<br />

is proposed by many authors in this area) and a slow interference effect<br />

described as the interference of emotion with stimuli presented after the<br />

threatening stimulus. They found evidence for a slow effect which lasted for<br />

one subsequent trial, but no evidence for a fast interference effect. They<br />

discussed several possible mechanisms which might explain the pattern of<br />

disruption found from negative emotional stimuli. McKenna & Sharma (2004)<br />

firstly discounted the theory that mood inductions across stimuli may explain<br />

the effects, one reason given was that the disruption effects observed lasted for<br />

187

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