The effects of fear vs. anger on emotional stroop tasks in young adults

This study has explored emotion-related cognitive control tasks known as Emotional Stroop Tasks (EST), with the objective of investigating potential differences between anger, fear, and neutral emotions. The study sample consisted of 69 healthy young adults aged between 18-29, all of whom had no neurological or psychiatric conditions and did not use any medications that could affect their cognitive functions. Two distinct versions of EST were employed in this study: one involving EST with emotionally-loaded words and the other involving emotional face pictures. For the word-based tasks, 60 emotionally loaded words were used (20 anger-related words, 20 fear-related words, and 30 neutral words). For the face pictures-based tasks, a collection of 108 pictures was used, and nine different types of stimuli were included. These stimuli included congruent fearful faces, congruent angry faces, congruent neutral faces, as well as incongruent fearful faces, incongruent angry faces, and incongruent neutral faces. The comparisons between anger and fear were measured both for reaction times (RT) and error rates (ER). The results supported the evidence that anger words led to more errors than neutral words, and congruent fear facial pictures led to more errors than congruent neutral facial pictures. Additionally, as expected, the results revealed significant differences in reaction times between congruent anger facial pictures and congruent neutral facial pictures, as well as incongruent anger facial pictures and incongruent neutral facial pictures. However, the comparisons between anger and fear did not reveal significant results in either of the ESTs. This study contributes to the existing literature on emotional processing by highlighting the comparable effects of fear and anger on emotional Stroop tasks in young adults. These findings suggest that the presence of emotional stimuli, regardless of the specific type of emotion, can disrupt attentional processes. Keywords: Emotional Stroop Task, Anger, Fear, Cognitive Control