Processing bias and anxiety in primary school children: a modified emotional Stroop colour-naming task using pictorial facial expressions

Heike Eschenbeck, Carl-Walter Kohlmann, Uwe Heim-Dreger, Damaris Koller, and Matthias Leser set out to test how young children handle information that signals threat. Across three separate studies they recruited non-clinical samples of primary school pupils between the ages of 6 and 10 (Study I with 92 participants, Study II with 63, and Study III with 225). Rather than relying on the usual word-based procedure, they built a picture version of the modified emotional Stroop colour-naming task, swapping printed words for photographs of faces. Some of those faces looked threatening; others looked happy.

One finding that came through early was practical. With children this young, the researchers argue, it pays to look at mistakes, not only at how fast a child names a colour. Error counts carried information that reaction times on their own would have missed.

In Study I, the pattern tied to personality. Children who scored high on trait anxiety made their most mistakes specifically on the threatening faces, and nowhere else in particular. The effect was selective, pointing to those stimuli rather than to a general tendency to err.

Study II shifted to momentary feelings instead of stable traits. There, state anxiety measured as worry lined up with a separate bias in error rates toward threat-related pictures. So the same kind of skew appeared whether the anxiety was a lasting characteristic or a passing state.

Study III added a wrinkle. Class level changed how colour-naming times and error data related to each other, which suggests the age or schooling stage of a child shapes what either measure can tell you. The authors place all of this alongside existing work on anxiety-linked Stroop interference in children and weigh what it adds to that record.

Key words: cognitive bias, anxiety, emotional Stroop task, children.