Central versus peripheral prsentation of stimuli in an emotional stroop task

Abstract

Four blocks of words, anxiety-related, anxiety-matched neutrals, happiness-related, and happiness-matched neutrals, were presented to subjects high and low in trait anxiety. Each block was presented once centrally and once peripherally. It was predicted that high-trait subjects would take longer to identify the colour of anxiety-related words as compared to anxiety-matched neutral words and that the magnitude of this effect should be greater for central as compared to peripheral presentation. Support was found only for the former hypothesis. Correlations demonstrated a different pattern of results for anxiety and depression. The content-specificity hypothesis is offered as an explanation for these findings.

Key Words:

• Anxiety
• depression
• Stroop
• content specificity