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 The Effects of Fear on Reaction Time Margiory Valle Indiana University Bloomington Abstract The main purpose of this experiment was to examine attentional bias and reaction time in relation to fear using an emotional Stroop test. 8 participants looked at 2 separate sets of 20 tinted images, their task was to name the color of each tinted image as fast as they could. 20 of the images were horror movie villains (interference) and the other 20 were stock images of regular people (control). The results supported the hypothesis, that those in the interference took longer than those in the control section. This data further supports the idea that emotions result in attentional bias and could additionally explain the nature of how people react to threats. Keywords: Stroop, reaction time, emotional response, fear, attentional bias The Effects of Fear on Reaction Time Fear can make people do strange things, resulting in them to display extreme reactions or take precautionary measures to avoid the thing that causes the fear. Most people have seen horror movies that have caused great fear and possibly even created phobias that have stuck with them. 

According to Wisconsin University Professor Joanne Cantor, the three things that people say scare them the most in horror films are the disturbing imagery, looming threat, and lack of control (The science of fear, 2017). It is well-known that emotions affect how we act, but how do emotions affect the speed of our reactions? Stroop, J. R. (1935) created “The Stroop Task”, one of the most famous psychological experiments, which was created to study interference and reaction time. In the most well-known of his Stroop experiments, he demonstrated that it is difficult to name the color of a word if the word doesn't match the color (such as the word “red” in blue). This is due to the speed of processing theory, which theorizes that interference is caused because we read words faster than we can identify colors. This could also be a result of the selective attention theory, which states that naming the color of a word requires more attention, causing interference as well. Since then, there have been many variations of the Stroop task, such as spatial, numerical, and emotional, to name a few. Emotional Stroop tasks involve looking at how people process stimuli based on emotions (Stroop effect, 2019). 

Patients with social and panic anxiety disorder demonstrated that they took longer to identify the color of a word if the threat words were relevant to their anxiety. Although, panic patients seemed to show more attentional bias to most threat words, whereas social patients mostly showed attentional bias to words that related to them and their disorder. The positive words didn’t cause any interference (Maidenberg, E. et al., 1996). Constantine, R., McNally, R. J., & Hornig, C. D. (2001), used a pictorial method to investigate the selective processing of threat cues. It was hypothesized that the threatening images would capture the participant's attention the most, in comparison to the positive and neutral images. Yet, the results demonstrated that both positive and threatening images caused interference when compared to neutral images. These are different results in comparison to the Maidenberg, E. et al. (1996) study, but it could signify that different types of anxiety disorders cause various different reactions depending on the severity. 

Andersson, G. et al. (2006) conducted experiments with two Stroop tasks measuring reaction time to social threat words. The first was the original Stroop task and the second was a web-based version. Even though the original Stroop task demonstrated the predicted results of interference taking longer, they found that the web-based version actually had facilitation effects. The participants responded to the threat words quicker than the neutral words, possibly due to information processing. In this experiment, the main purpose is to continue looking into emotions and attentional bias, and further determine if general fear affects reaction time. In order to do this, eight participants will be shown a series of 20 interference images and 20 neutral images, both tinted. Their task is to name the color of the images as fast as they can. The hypothesis in this experiment is that participants will take longer in the interference condition compared to the neutral condition. Method Participants There were eight participants, all of them were current Indiana University students. Three of the participants were friends of mine and five were random people on the dorm floor. Six were female and two were male. Materials The program used to show the images was Google Slides and the device used was a MacBook Pro. Each image was centered and 7.5in x 6in (on full screen). The colors used on the images were, blue, pink, red, purple, green, orange, and yellow. The images were tinted using the “Format Options” tool under the “Format” tab in Google Slides. The participants were timed with the stopwatch feature in the clock app on the iPhone. Procedure The participants were told that they would look at 20 images at a time, 40 images in total. Each photo was tinted and there were two stimuli: interference (horror movie villain images) and control (neutral stock images of people). The slides were counterbalanced, four participants began with the interference slides and four began with the control slides. Each participant was alone in the room with me to avoid confound. The participants were told to disregard the contents of the image and focus on the color. Their task was to name the color as fast as they could. The participants were told that they would be timed. The total time to complete each 20 image trial was measured in seconds. I was in charge of hitting the spacebar on the laptop to flip through the images once they named the color. Results Participants in the neutral condition took a mean time of 22.76 seconds, whereas the participants in the interference condition took a mean time of 23.62 seconds. The difference between the two conditions is 0.86 seconds. The data was input into a randomization applet which ran the collected data in 10,000 simulations, which is shown in Table 1. As hypothesized, participants took longer in the interference condition than in the neutral condition, p = 0.313. But because the p-value is 31.3%, it is not statistically significant. Table 1. Average Individual Time Difference for Participant Slide Completion Discussion The main purpose of this study was to examine emotions and attentional bias, specifically fear and reaction time, using a pictorial information processing method. The hypothesis in this experiment was that participants in the interference section would take longer than participants in the control section. The results did support the hypothesis, those in the interference section took slightly longer to complete the slides. Although, the results weren’t statistically significant, which means that the statistical relationship’s probability in this sample is likely due to chance. Yet previous studies, some of which have used pictorial methods such as, Constantine, R., McNally, R. J., & Hornig, C. D. (2001) and word methods such as Maidenberg, E. et al. (1996) have demonstrated similar, but stronger data that support this experiment hypothesis. Three participants completed the interference slides faster than the control slides, two of the three began with the interference slides. This could possibly be due to a different kind of emotional response. Instead of attentional bias which results in delayed reaction time, the participants might have performed faster out of fear in order to complete the slides and no longer have to look at the scary images. Or it could also be due to information processing caused by facilitation effects, explained in the web-based version of the Stroop test conducted in Andersson, G. et al. (2006). One of the largest variables that could have affected the results was that some participants had trouble identifying the colors. For example, some would confuse the color purple and pink, which would result in them taking longer to respond. This confound could be fixed in future experiments by reducing the number of colors used and avoiding using similar colors, such as pink and purple or orange and red. Another confound that could have affected the results was having the person conducting the experiment, in this case, me, press the spacebar to change slides instead of having the participant press it. The participants pressing the spacebar could perhaps demonstrate increased accuracy of response speed if done in a future experiment. Unlike the original Stroop task (Stroop, J. R., 1935), which tests the relations between word colors and word meanings, these emotional Stroop Tasks look at the relationship between a word or image meaning and attentional bias due to emotional reactions to those images (Emotional Stroop Test, 2017). 

Yet like the original Stroop test, which mentioned the speed of processing theory, meaning that people process and name a word faster than the color. These findings can support that fear causes an automatic emotional response that is processed faster than the colors of images, which can’t be controlled. These findings provide additional evidence supporting the idea that reactional delays occur if a person finds an emotional personal relevance with the stimuli, a hypothesis which is commonly tested with the emotional Stroop (Emotional Stroop Test, 2017). This data could lead to further explanations and research regarding the nature of how humans react to stimuli they perceive as threatening. 

References 

1. The science of fear: what makes us afraid? (n.d.). Retrieved February 28, 2019, from https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-science-of-fear-what-makes-us-afraid/ 
2. Stroop effect. (2019). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stroop_effect&oldid=883555149 Stroop, J. R. (1935). 
3. Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18(6), 643. Maidenberg, E., Chen, E., Craske, M., Bohn, P., & Bystritsky, A. (1996). 
4. Specificity of attentional bias in panic disorder and social phobia. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 10(6), 529-541. Andersson, G., Westöö, J., Johansson, L., & Carlbring, P. (2006). 
5. Cognitive Bias Via the Internet: A Comparison of Web‐Based and Standard Emotional Stroop Tasks in Social Phobia. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 35(1), 55-62. Emotional Stroop test. (2017). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emotional_Stroop_test&oldid=813296489