Duncombe, Angela (2020) The Role of Trait Anxiety in the Emotional Stroop Effect. Honours thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
Anxious individuals have an attentional bias towards negative stimuli. The emotional Stroop task is a well-established, colour naming task, used to show the effect of attentional biases. This produces a delayed response, known as the emotional Stroop effect (ESE). Previous studies have identified robust ESEs in clinical populations, including clinical anxiety, but it was considered one effect, whereas recent research has identified that the ESE can include a delayed response on the target stimulus (i.e., a fast effect), and on the following stimulus (i.e., a slow effect). This project sought to investigate for the very first time, the fast and slow effects in the ESE in a sample of individuals with clinical levels of trait anxiety. This study tested a sample of 25 clinically anxious individuals on an emotional Stroop task using negative and neutral word stimuli from McKenna and Sharma (2004) and an additional category of anxiety word stimuli. A 3 x 5 ANOVA was used to look for an interaction between word type and position, with a particular focus on Position 1 for the fast effect, and Position 2 for the slow effect. Although it was hypothesised that the data would show a clear fast effect on anxious and negative words, as predicted by the Neural Network Model, this study found neither a fast nor a slow effect. This study aimed to contribute to the understanding of mechanisms of the ESE in populations with elevated trait anxiety.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Honours) |
|---|---|
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Historic - Faculty of Health, Engineering and Sciences - School of Psychology and Counselling (1 Jan 2015 - 31 Dec 2021) |
| Supervisors: | Jessica Marrington; Gerry Tehan; Crystal McMullen |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Science (Honours) |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Jul 2025 06:07 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Jul 2025 06:07 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Trait anxiety; emotional Stroop effect; fast effect; attentional bias. |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52290 |
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