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Description
Studies based on the “emotional” variants of the Stroop task (eStroop) have shown that stimulus valence shapes response latency to salient stimuli. This modulation likely reflects the different implicit attentional capture by negatively vs. positively valenced words, with these stimulus categories being typically associated with longer and shorter response times (RTs), respectively, compared to neutral words. However, the existing evidence on the eStroop might be confounded by other semantic features of emotional words, and particularly their "social" content. It is therefore necessary to disentangle the effects of individual vs. social stimuli on implicit word processing when assessing the effect of different emotional stimuli on the eStroop task. On this basis, this study aims to examine the time course of these effects, and to investigate possible behavioral and neural differences that might correlate with more direct measures of attentional processing.
Thirty-four healthy participants underwent electrophysiological (EEG) recording while performing a socio-emotional Stroop including words of Italian language characterized by high arousal levels and differing in terms of semantic content (social/individual) and valence (positive/negative). Preliminary behavioral analyses confirm a facilitatory effect of processing positive, compared with negative, individual emotional words, and an opposite pattern when processing social emotional ones. Early and late ERP component analyses highlighted significant differences in the neural processing of individual emotional and social features compared to neutral stimuli, contributing to the observed behavioral patterns. These results provide insights into the neural circuits underlying the distinctive implicit attentional capture by social emotional, compared with individual emotional, target words.
