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The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The ...

Tel-Aviv University

It takes people longer to name the ink colour of emotion or threat words than that of neutral words, the emotional Stroop effect (ESE). In three experiments with normal and patient populations, we show that the ESE is a special case of a generic attention model and effect entailed in Garner's speeded classification paradigm. Guided by the Garner model we demonstrate that task-irrelevant dimensions that differ in salience can produce the ESE and mimic it with neutral stimuli. When each word appears in a constant colour, as mandated in the correlation condition of the Garner design, the ESE is eliminated. This important result is consistent with the attention account of the ESE. We conclude that when emotion stimuli appear in a random fashion they interfere with task performance. However, when emotion stimuli are correlated with features of the ongoing task they help task performance not least due to their extreme salience.

When emotion does and does not impair performance: a Garner theory of the emotional Stroop effect.

Recent studies indicate that the ability to represent absolute pitch values in long-term memory, long believed to be the possession of a small minority of trained musicians endowed with "absolute pitch," is in fact shared to some extent by a considerable proportion of the population. The current study examined whether this newly discovered ability affects aspects of music and auditory cognition, particularly pitch learning and evaluation. Our starting points are two well-established premises: (1) frequency of occurrence has an influence on the way we process stimuli; (2) in Western music, some pitches and musical keys are much more frequent than others. Based on these premises, we hypothesize that if absolute pitch values are indeed represented in long-term memory, pitch frequency of occurrence in music would significantly affect cognitive processes, in particular pitch learning and evaluation. Two experiments were designed to test this hypothesis in participants with no absolute pitch, most with little or no musical training. Experiment 1 demonstrated a faster response and a learning advantage for frequent pitches over infrequent pitches in an identification task. In Experiment 2, participants evaluated infrequent pitches as more pleasing than frequent pitches when presented in isolation. These results suggest that absolute pitch representation in memory may play a substantial, hitherto unacknowledged role in auditory (and specifically musical) cognition.

Pitch memory and exposure effects.

Sustained effects of emotion are well known in everyday experience. Surprisingly, such effects are seldom recorded in laboratory studies of the emotional Stroop task, in which participants name the color of emotion and neutral words. Color performance is more sluggish with emotion words than with neutral words, the emotional Stroop effect (ESE). The ESE is not sensitive to the order in which the two groups of words are presented, so the effect of exposure to emotion words does not extend to disrupting performance in a subsequent block with neutral words. We attribute this absence of a sustained effect to habituation engendered by excessive repetition of the experimental stimuli. In a series of four experiments, we showed that sustained effects do occur when habituation is removed, and we also showed that the massive exposure to negative stimuli within the ESE paradigm induces a commensurately negative mood. A novel perspective is offered, in which the ESE is considered a special case of mood induction.

Is the emotional Stroop task a special case of mood induction? Evidence from sustained effects of attention under emotion.

Polymorphism of the FTO gene encoding an N(6)-methyladenosine (m(6)A) RNA demethylase was robustly associated with human obesity; however, the mechanism by which FTO affects metabolism, considering its emerging role in RNA modification, is still poorly understood. A new study published in Cell Research reports novel functions implicating FTO in the regulation of mRNA alternative splicing in the control of adipogenesis.

FTO: linking m6A demethylation to adipogenesis.

We test the hypothesis that naming an object depicted in a picture and reading aloud an object's name are affected by the object's speed. We contend that the mental representations of everyday objects and situations include their speed, and that the latter influences behavior in instantaneous and systematic ways. An important corollary is that high-speed objects are named faster than low-speed objects, although object speed is irrelevant to the naming task at hand. The results of a series of 7 studies with pictures and words support these predictions.

Speeded naming or naming speed? The automatic effect of object speed on performance.

Naïve and primed pluripotent states retain distinct molecular properties, yet limited knowledge exists on how their state transitions are regulated. Here, we identify Mettl3, an N(6)-methyladenosine (m(6)A) transferase, as a regulator for terminating murine naïve pluripotency. Mettl3 knockout preimplantation epiblasts and naïve embryonic stem cells are depleted for m(6)A in mRNAs, yet are viable. However, they fail to adequately terminate their naïve state and, subsequently, undergo aberrant and restricted lineage priming at the postimplantation stage, which leads to early embryonic lethality. m(6)A predominantly and directly reduces mRNA stability, including that of key naïve pluripotency-promoting transcripts. This study highlights a critical role for an mRNA epigenetic modification in vivo and identifies regulatory modules that functionally influence naïve and primed pluripotency in an opposing manner.

Stem cells. m6A mRNA methylation facilitates resolution of naïve pluripotency toward differentiation.

Gene expression can be regulated post-transcriptionally through dynamic and reversible RNA modifications. A recent noteworthy example is N(6)-methyladenosine (m(6)A), which affects messenger RNA (mRNA) localization, stability, translation and splicing. Here we report on a new mRNA modification, N(1)-methyladenosine (m(1)A), that occurs on thousands of different gene transcripts in eukaryotic cells, from yeast to mammals, at an estimated average transcript stoichiometry of 20% in humans. Employing newly developed sequencing approaches, we show that m(1)A is enriched around the start codon upstream of the first splice site: it preferentially decorates more structured regions around canonical and alternative translation initiation sites, is dynamic in response to physiological conditions, and correlates positively with protein production. These unique features are highly conserved in mouse and human cells, strongly indicating a functional role for m(1)A in promoting translation of methylated mRNA.

Moshe Shay Ben-Haim

School of Psychological Sciences

Tel-Aviv University

The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content