Testing the Stroop Effect in a Nonclinical Sample: Hypervigilance or Difficulty to Disengage?

Abstract

Traditional interpretations of the bias have suggested that anxious people are hypervigilant to threat; that is, their attention orients more quickly towards threatening stimuli. Recent research has questioned the validity of this interpretation, suggesting that difficulty disengaging attention from threat might play a role in the attentional bias. A limited number of experimental paradigms have differentiated between hypervigilance and difficulty disengaging. In this study, 169 undergraduate students completed an emotional Stroop task to investigate the presence of an attentional bias to threat, and a lexical decision task to differentiate between hypervigilance and difficulty disengaging. Hypotheses regarding the emotional Stroop task were partially supported; Stroop effects were found in some, but not all, of the threat-types investigated. Lexical decision task results lent support for the hypervigilance hypothesis. Anxiety levels did not predict the extent of the attentional bias. Results are discussed in relation to future directions for attentional bias research.