Camelia Danciu
College of the Canyons
Introduction There are certain activities we perform on a daily basis that become automatic. If the activity is performed out of the ordinary, then more focus or thought is put forth on the activity to complete it. An example would be placing the car keys on a different spot from the usual would make one think twice about their location. The Stroop Effect is widely used in psychological assessments as a way to measure the selective attention and processing abilities of individuals, which include cognitive stimulation, planning, and decision-making in real life situations. The experiment, developed by John Ridley Stroop in 1935, consisted of tasks, in which subjects were to name the color with the word, whether they were matching or not. The time it took to name the colors between the matching color/word and mismatched color/word were different. The distraction in the daily activity described above and mismatching of the color and word create interferences that affect the way individuals respond to each situation.
According to van Maanen et al. (2009) and Zhang et al. (2013), in the original version of Stroop’s experiment, the participants had to answer questions about a list of stimuli that engaged their attention. The experiment consists of three conditions in which the stimuli were colors (the target) and the words describing the colors (the distracter). In the congruent condition, the color matches the word, for example the word “red” typed in red ink. The second …show more content…
People suffering from a mental disorder will take a longer time to complete the Stroop Effect test than people who are not suffering from a mental disorder (Tomaszewska, Markowska & Borkowska,