THE EMOTIONAL STROOP TASK AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Attentional bias is a central feature of many cognitive theories of ps ychopathology. One of the most frequent methods of investigating such bias has been an emotional analog of the Stroop task. In this task, pa rticipants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words v ary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology. The authors r eview research showing that patients are often slower to name the colo r of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condit ion. They address the causes and mechanisms underlying the phenomenon, focusing on J. D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, and J. L. McClelland's (1990) par allel distributed processing model.