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264 PART III: Experimental Methods“mismatch” condition because reading the word interferes with naming thecolor. Further studies show that this effect occurs even when the words arepresented too quickly (e.g., 15 msec [milliseconds]) for participants to be consciouslyaware that a word was presented!In the emotional Stroop task, the color words are replaced with content wordsthat are particularly relevant to participants’ concerns. For example, an experimentthat examines nonconscious attention in people with phobias may usewords such as “snake” and “spider.” For phobic participants, identifying the colorof these words takes longer than identifying words with neutral content, evenwhen the words are presented subliminally (outside of conscious awareness).Kaiser and her colleagues (2006) used the emotional Stroop task to investigatewhether women with an expectation of being stigmatized through sexism woulddemonstrate greater nonconscious attention to sexist words compared to nonsexistwords. They tested 35 women in a 2 3 complex design. The first manipulatedindependent variable was social-identity with two conditions, threat andsafety, in a random groups design. Participants were led to believe that after completingthe computer task, they would partner with a male participant (actuallyfictitious) to complete a group project. They were supplied with informationabout their partner so that they could get a sense of his personal characteristics. Inthe identity-threat condition, their partner held sexist views (e.g., strongly agreeingwith statements such as “I could not work for a female boss because women canbe overly emotional”). In the identity-safety condition, the partner was presentedas nonsexist and strongly disagreed with sexist statements.The second independent variable in their 2 3 design was word type withthree levels: social-identity threatening, illness threatening, or nonthreatening.This variable was manipulated using a repeated measures design; thus, all participantswere tested with all three word types in a completely counterbalancedorder. The social-identity threatening words were sexist in content, such as hoand hooters. The illness-threatening words (e.g., cancer, mono) were included asa control condition to determine whether women in the identity-threat conditionwould pay attention to threatening words in general and not just socialidentitythreatening words. The nonthreatening words, also a control condition,de scribed common household objects, such as broom and curtains. In one part ofKaiser et al.’s experiment, all three types of words were presented subliminally(15 msec) in different colors (red, yellow, blue, green), and participants’ taskwas to identify the color. Tests showed that participants were unaware thatwords were presented. The dependent variable in this study was the responsetime for identifying the color (in milliseconds). This response-time measureassessed the amount of subliminal attention given to the different word types;longer response times indicate greater subliminal attention to the word andtherefore a longer time to identify the color. The mean response times for eachof the six conditions are presented in Table 8.5.As Kaiser and her colleagues predicted, an interaction effect occurredbetween the two independent variables. Women in the identity-threat condition(first row of Table 8.5) took longest to name colors when social-identity threateningwords were presented compared to illness-threatening and nonthreateningwords. Longer response times to name the colors indicate that the womenpaid more subliminal attention to the words. Thus, women who expected to