Inducing a Stroop Effect

We examine the conditions that lead to Stroop interference for a meaningless linguistic label. Tiffany's cognitive model of drug abuse implies that individuals will respond more slowly to drug‐related words compared to neutral words in an emotional Stroop task, because the former have many automatic associations (e.g. positive expectancies). To examine this proposal, we trained participants to associate a meaningless label with either one other word or several other words and examined the induced Stroop interference for these meaningless labels. In two experiments, and contrary to expectations from Tiffany's work, we observed greatest Stroop interference for the meaningless label with just one association. These results are discussed in terms of associative learning theory. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.