Unlike the traditional Stroop effect, the words presented either relate to specific emotional states or disorders, or they are neutral (e.g., "watch", "bottle", "sky").
Thus, the emotional Stroop does not involve an effect of conflict between a word meaning and a color of text, but rather appears to capture attention and slow response time due to the emotional relevance of the word for the individual.
Both the standard Stroop effect and the emotional Stoop task have high test-retest reliability.
Thus the contribution of lexical characteristics to results of an emotional Stroop test should be considered when used in research.
Also, Mathey & Gobin, 2010[19] found that, though a word's emotional valence influences visual identification, its orthographic neighbours are also a factor in processing speed; they suggest further investigation on this issue.
A primary finding of the study was that words with a negative, higher-frequency orthographic neighbour were recognised more slowly than those with a neutral one.