Don't be afraid of irrelevant words: the emotional Stroop effect is confined to attended words

The emotional Stroop effect denotes slower responses to the colour of negative words (e.g., death) compared to neutral words (e.g., mug). Popular explanations assume a general power of negative words to capture visual attention. However, in the typical task, the irrelevant word stimulus and the relevant colour stimulus are perceptually integrated. We compared interference from negative words, which were part of the relevant visual object, to interference from negative words that were part of an irrelevant object, or occurred in the background, respectively. Results showed that only negative words in the relevant object delayed colour-naming responses, compared to neutral words. Negative words outside the relevant object failed to affect performance. This finding is at odds with the claim that negative words could capture spatial or object-based mechanisms of visual attention. However, the finding is consistent with the idea that negative words interfere with the allocation of dimensional attention to different features of an attended object.