Emotional dilution of the Stroop effect: a new tool for assessing attention under emotion

In order to gauge in a precise fashion the capture of attention by emotional stimuli, we developed a new tool that imports the classic Stroop effect into the realm of emotion. Strooping the typical emotion tasks enabled the derivation of a pure intraitem measure of attention under emotion. The results of two experiments showed that the classic Stroop effects were smaller with emotion than with neutral words, demonstrating the power of emotion to bias attention. This emotional dilution of the Stroop effect can serve as a general-purpose tool for assessing attention under emotion.