In psychology, the emotional Stroop task is used as an information-processing approach to assessing emotions. Related to the standard Stroop effect, the emotional Stroop test works by examining the response time of the participant to name colors of negative emotional words. For example, depressed participants will be slower to say the color of depressing words rather than non-depressing words. Non-clinical subjects have also been shown to name the color of an emotional word (e.g., "war", "cancer", "kill") slower than naming the color of a neutral word (e.g., "clock", "lift", "windy").
While the emotional Stroop test and the classic Stroop effect elicit similar behavioral outcomes (a slowing in response times to colored words), these tests engage different mechanisms of interference. The classic Stroop test creates a conflict between an incongruent color and word (the word "RED" in font color blue) but the emotional Stroop involves only emotional and neutral words—color does not affect slowing because it does not conflict with word meaning. In other words, studies show the same effects of slowing for emotional words relative to neutral even if all the words are black. Thus, the emotional Stroop does not involve an effect of conflict between a word meaning and a color of text, but rather appears to capture attention and slow response time due to the emotional relevance of the word for the individual. The emotional Stroop test has been used broadly in clinical studies using emotional words related to a particular individual's area of concern, such as alcohol-related words for someone who is alcoholic, or words involving a particular phobia for someone with anxiety or phobic disorders. Both the classic and the emotional Stroop tests, however, involve the need to suppress responses to distracting word information, while selectively maintaining attention on the color of the word to complete the task.
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“[How] the young . . . can grow from the primitive to the civilized, from emotional anarchy to the disciplined freedom of maturity without losing the joy of spontaneity and the peace of self-honesty is a problem of education that no school and no culture have ever solved.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply.... We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, “How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?””
—William Golding (b. 1911)