Manifestation of the emotional Stroop effect in students when responding to words from the semantic field of "Alcohol"

Abstract

In practice, psychologists, social workers, forensic scientists, advertisers, etc. have to face the need to reveal hidden, unconscious or knowingly false information from a certain person. The use of the emotional Stroop test (EST), which is based on differences in the latent period (LP) of the reaction (response time) to emotionally colored and neutral words, can help. As a model, emotional words from the semantic field of "alcohol" were used during the EST passage by students. The survey involved students aged 18 to 23, 9 boys and 12 girls. The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) was revealed, namely a longer response time to emotionally colored words compared to neutral ones, which confirms the effectiveness of the EST technique to identify hidden tendencies of the subject. ESE is more pronounced in women than in men, which can probably be explained by more frequent alcohol consumption by men who do not see anything special in such stimuli. The connection between the LP reaction to emotional words and blood groups (according to the ABO system) in women was interesting. Women with the first blood group had longer LP reactions when performing EST compared with women with the second blood group, while women with the third blood group had intermediate values of the LP reaction. That is, like men, women with the second blood group did not see anything extraordinary in words from the semantic field of "alcohol". In women with the first blood group, the ESE was the highest and had the strongest difference between the reaction to neutral and emotional words for the left hand, which indicates the involvement of the right hemisphere in the processing of emotional information. The results obtained require additional research, as the sample was small. However, it can be assumed that the predisposition to alcohol consumption and emotional response to it is associated with blood type and biochemical characteristics of the organism, so further research in this area is promising.