ABSTRACT

Objectives

People are constantly exposed to various sensory stimuli throughout their lives and make decisions by paying attention to these stimuli to survive. A conflict arises when a stimulus from the environment is incongruent with the task and may have a disruptive effect on the individual’s performance. In this study, it was aimed to share the process of creation of an Emotional Stroop test based on face- word stroop paradigm that can be applied to children and adolescents in order to measure how children and adolescents deal with emotional conflicts and their ability to resolve these conflicts.

Materials and Methods

Photographs in the NIMH-Child Emotional Faces Picture Set and the words in the Turkish Emotional and Semantic Evaluative Norm Database (TÜDADEN) were evaluated by 5 clinicians and 20 healthy adolescents. The photos and words that were found to have the highest compliance were paired up with Inquisit 4.0 software program.

Results

As a result of the 2- step evaluation of 482 photos in the NIMH-Child Emotional Faces Picture Set there was 95% compliance in eight photos, 85% in two photos, 80% in four photos, 75% in one photo, and 70% in four photos. In the analysis of the 2-step evaluation of the TÜDADEN word database, it was observed that 15 words (5 neutral, 5 positive, 5 negative values) achieved at least 70% concordance on the degree of domination, arousal and abstraction/concreteness.

Conclusion

It is thought that the Emotional Stroop test we developed can contribute to child and adolescent psychiatry literature by further use in subsequent studies on large-scale samples.