The Emotional Stroop Task and Psychopathology J.Mark G.Williams

Attentional bias is a central feature of many cognitive theories of psychopathology. One of the most frequent methods of investigating such bias has been an emotional analog of the Stroop task. In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology. The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition. They address the causes and mechanisms underlying the phenomenon, focusing on J. D. Cohen, K. Dun-bar, and J. L. McClelland's (1990) parallel distributed processing model. Anxiety and depressive disorders remain the most common forms of psychopathology and represent a large challenge for psychological analysis and treatment. Although the various forms of emotional disorder differ in many ways, recent cogni-tive accounts have pointed out how each of them share a com-mon feature: sensitivity to and preoccupation with stimuli in their environment that represent their concern. Central to these cognitive theories of psychopathology is the notion that suc