In Part A of TMA 05 you are asked to analyse a dataset and write a full research report. This assessment builds on the report writing and data analysis skills you developed in TMA 04. The D120 module team has created an experiment and a demo version of this experiment is available for you to try. You have also been supplied with a data set based on this experiment. This will form the basis of your report.
You were introduced to the experiment you will write a report on in Week 22, Activity 22.9, when you were given the opportunity to try a demo version as a participant. This experiment builds on research evidence about the Stroop effect (1935) and the emotional Stroop effect (McKenna, 1986) which you learned about in Week 21.
In the Stroop task, people are asked to name the colour of a word while ignoring what the word says. In Week 21 you learned that in the original Stroop (1935) study, when the text of the words is incongruous with the ink colour (e.g. when the ink colour is ‘red’ but the word reads ‘green’), reading interferes with colour naming. Building on this finding, McKenna (1986) investigated whether emotion words can also interfere with colour naming. He measured response times for colour naming across two different conditions. In one condition participants were presented with emotional words and in the other condition the words were neutral. He reported that participants were slower to name the colour of emotional words than neutral words. He suggested that this occurs because emotional words capture attention.