Emotional Stroop Task

Anxiety and depressive disorders remain the most common forms of psychopathology and represent a large challenge for psychological analysis and treatment. Although the various forms of emotional disorder differ in many ways, recent cognitive accounts have pointed out how each of them share a common feature: sensitivity to and preoccupation with stimuli in their environment that represent their concern. Central to these cognitive theories of psychopathology is the notion that such preoccupation arises from biases in attention. For example, hypervigilance to cues signaling impending danger from the environment is an important feature of recent models of anxiety (Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, 1985), and similar hypersensitivity to bodily sensations has been implicated in panic disorder (Clark, 1988; McNally, 1990). In posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention is drawn to stimuli that remind of past trauma and exacerbate the fear of future similar events (Yule, 1991 ). In depression, the preoccupation is with past losses, the mind being dominated by ruminations such as "I have lost my friends" and "