Attentional Capture, Not Freezing: Negative Valence Modulates Selective Attention in a Novel Typing Stroop Paradigm

Attention is often biased toward emotional stimuli, which may be processed automatically and prioritized over non-emotional information. The emotional Stroop task was developed to assess this bias, but its validity has been questioned because it lacks key features of a true Stroop paradigm, including semantic overlap, response competition, and meaningful congruency conditions. In the present study, we developed a novel emotional Stroop paradigm that preserves these defining characteristics while controlling the linguistic properties of the stimuli. On each trial, participants simultaneously viewed a word and heard a spoken word and were instructed to type the word they heard while ignoring the word they saw. Across trials, we manipulated word valence and congruency. Across two studies, we observed larger Stroop effects for negatively valenced words than for neutral words, driven by both increased interference on incongruent trials and increased facilitation on congruent trials. We also observed a robust attentional bias effect, with better performance on incongruent trials when negative words served as targets rather than distractors. In contrast, positively valenced words did not show consistent modulation of Stroop or attentional bias effects. Together, these findings demonstrate that negative valence modulates selective attention within a true Stroop context.