Gender Impact on the Stroop Effect - Research Paper Example

Gender Impact on the Stroop Effect Customer Inserts His/Her Name Customer Inserts Grade Course Customer Inserts Tutor’s Name Insert Date Here (Day, Month, Year) Abstract The Stroop Effect reflects the reaction time of a work or a task and females and children reportedly to be quicker at showing their reaction towards the stroop tests. With the increase in age, the reaction time adopted to complete the test also increases. The Stroop effect is a research showing the age related and gender differences in selective attention, automatic approach, inhibitory process and executive control. This test should be formed as an assessment tool in cases where one can witness the mild cognitive impairment in geriatric population. The aim of the present study is to show among the school children where there is any gender difference in Stroop effect tasks. Hereby the series of A4 cards were collected and these cards were run through in the order printed on front of the envelope. In the room 20 subjects, 10 boys and 10 girls were taken. They were shown these Stroop tests cards whereby colour terms were written by making use of the different ink colours. They were all asked to recognize the colours of the ink with the help of which items were written on the cards and the measurement was taken on the time taken by each student by making use of the stopwatch. In the study below, Univariate analysis of variance and t tests were carried out for analysis of data. There were unique differences seen between males and females while naming the incongruent colours. Here it was found that female’s performance was best than the males in the colour recognition skills and also advanced language flexibility. Introduction The Stroop effect shows the time taken by the participants to react at the specific task provided. At the time when a word like a blue, red, green is printed in a colour different from the colour expressing different semantic meaning, there is always a delay in comprehending the colour of the word, causing the slower reaction time and rise in mistakes. The Stroop effect was first formulated by John Rodley Stroop who had first published its effect in the year 1935. There are two theories to give explanation of the Stroop effect: the one is Speed of Processing Theory and the other is Selective Attention theory. (Harris, 2005) The Speed of Processing theory shows that often there is interference while reading because we can read words faster as contrast to the naming of the colours. The other theory states that more attention span is required to read colours as compared to read words. It is also seen that in monolinguals, the reaction span of students increased during the stoop experiments when the foreign language displayed similarity to the phonological resemblance to the language they used whereas during bilinguals, it was seen that while naming the colours, participants were slower and the language of the colour names were the same. (Dyer, 1971) Females are found to be faster in showing their reaction towards the Stroop tests and are more at the advantageous position when it comes to the identification and naming of the colours and it is on account of their response speed. In a study conducted by Peter J. Houx, Jellemer Jolles and Fred W. Vreeling in 1993 regarding interference of stoop on aging and gender, it was found that the reaction time taken by the elderly population was more whereas their was no observation regarding the sex difference. The development of the Stroop tests can be undertaken as a part of the assessment tool in cases where there are chances of mild cognitive impairment in the geriatric population. It was generally seen that there had been a close correlation between the Mini Mental State Examination score and the activities depended on the Stroop effects and it was soon found that the Stroop effect could be used to diagnose forgetfulness and mild case of dementia. (Hisashi, 2002) Certain studies have found that the Stroop test involves many kind of inconsistencies, though there have been many generalizations regarding the Stroop effect but studies like MacLeod in 1991 came out with the differences between boys and girls on the interference card, where as certain studies showed that men and women had not been able to display differential interferences, still other studies found that women had been more quicker on the Stroop colour word card test than men. (Sarmany, 1977) Studies concerning the impact of the Stroop effect interferences are very less and the knowledge pertaining to the semantic interference in the stoop effect and its course development would help in the identification of the mild cognitive impairment. Some studies state that girls react faster than boys while some studies suggest that there is no gender difference during the process of naming the stoop colours. The aim of the study was to found out the gender differences, which is quite relevant during Stroop test. Students in the class were given the A4 cards to identify and name the colours on the cards and it was hypothesized that girls’ reaction time towards the naming and identification of the colours is less than the boys. Method The study was undertaken by making use of the repeated measure design, whereby all the participants in an experiment undertake experience in all conditions. This solves the purpose by first allowing the participants themselves to take part in the action. The participants were divided into two parts, the first 10 participants were provided with the A4 cards listed with the alphabets A, B and C which was followed by the other lists D E and F, and then the rest of the 10 participants were provided with the lists D, E and F pursued by the lists A, B and C. All the participants were made to enter the classroom near the library and they were given tests one at a time. They were given these different cards having four boxes with different colours but before that we assured ourselves that the students participating had a similar standard of intellectual ability. They were also made aware of the fact that this test was not conducted to test their general intelligence level and that there was neither right nor wrong answer. Inside the room along with me there was batch of 4 more participants, one was to record the time for each person on the chart and the other to make the record of the mistake for every one on the list on the separate chart and one having stop watch to calculate the time of the participant for each person on the list. The test was marked by the scoring pattern, which was based on the time taken in seconds to give the name in colours. These cards had different colours on it, printed in the primary and secondary colours and all written as 0000. There was a repetition of five colours, which could be appeared in the random sequence and were printed 20 times without the colour appearing again. Special care was also undertaken to ensure that there is no matching of the word with the colour with the page yielding the colour word score. The materials required for this were cards, charts for recording the time, data, one chart for recording of the mistakes and three lists constituting colour words. All the participants were given time to reach the room and we along with the other member teams were also there. They were then asked to sit down and cards were handed to them and they were asked if they understood what exactly they are expected to do? After putting participants at ease, the paper was started and the time was recorded by making use of the stop watch and the timing was written down on time chart and the recording of the mistakes was done by the other member of the team. When the participants had finished with this task they were thanked for the same. Results The results were found that participants were slower at naming the colours in the NCn condition (M = 31.62, SD = 2.12) than they were at reading the words in the RCWn condition (M = 18.56, SD = 0.52). Incongruent ink colour had little impact on reading words in the RCWd condition (M = 20.54, SD = 0.95) but negatively affected the speed at which the colour was named in the NCd condition. Because of the fact that the study was of a parametric design in other words the testing of the data was done and brought the hypothesis that the result had come out what was expected. For the results, the Spearman’s Rho method was used to adopt the inferential and descriptive statistics to form the Graphs to illustrate the results. With its help, the relationship between the participant times and the stroop effect was studied to examine if there is any scope for one variable to be accredited to the difference in the other variable, this is what Psychologists call correlation. This method of Spearman’s Rho is used for making assessment of the correlation between the variables in the study. Discussions The hypothesis of the study states the fact that the gender has the impact on the Stroop effect with the females were faster in showing their response when it comes to the identification and in naming of the colours. Females have come out to be in more advantageous position when it comes to the identification and naming of the colours. The study conducted by Peter J. Houx, Jellemer Jolles and Fred W. Vreeling (1993) on the gender and aging issue, it was found that the time taken by the elderly population was more while they had no results to display the sex difference. In one of the studies conducted among the Kuwaiti and British male and female subjects on the Stroop Colour and Word Test whereby 210 university students, 140 Kuwaiti and 70 British became the participants, it was to conform to the hypothesis that females generally display more differential interference than males in different cultures. The study revealed the fact that Kuwaiti college students showed more interference than British counterparts, without any gender differences observed on Stroop interferences. There had been intensive literature since last 50 years and some around 400 studies on the interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task. In doing so there has been a set of 18 most authentic empirical findings that could be used to make any theory on the Stroop effects a success. The theoretical positions on the same have been summarized and evaluation undertaken on the same with the two most important candidate theories, relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading by MacLeod in 1991. It is said that, “recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention. (MacLeod, 1991 p. 163) The studies of the Stroop’s research are still evident from earlier works of James McKeen Cattell in 1886. In one of his doctoral project under the supervision of Wilhelm Wundt, Cattell produced the report that objects and colours take larger time to name aloud as compared to the words. Saying red to a patch of colour is always slower than saying of the word red. His explanation is modern in the sense that in the case of words and letters, the association between the idea and name has taken place so often that the process has become automatic, whereas in the case of colors and pictures we must by a voluntary effort to choose the name. Even Brown had found that ink-color naming would be more beneficial than extended practice and color word reading. (MacLeod, 1991) Various studies have been undertaken to study the effect of Stroop Color and Word Test and each of them had shown that there had been considerable gender difference regarding total time taken to accomplish the task of the Color Naming and Word Reading cards whereby women have outperformed men. Reference List Block, J. (2005). The Stroop effect: its relation to personality. Personality and Individual Differences 38(3): 735-746. Dulaney, C.L, Rogers, W.A., (1994). Mechanisms underlying reduction in stroop interference with practice for young and old adults. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 20 (2); 470-484 Dyer, F.N., (1971). Colour naming interference in monolinguals and bilinguals. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior. 10 (3); 297-302 Harris, E.S. (2005) First Place Science Fair Projects for Inquisitive Kids. New York, NY: Lark Books. Hisashi, U., Kohei, K., (2002). Basic study of automatic dementia diagnosed with Stroop Effect. Bulletin of Nagaoka. 24; 75-80. Houx, P.J., Jolles, J., Vreeling F.W., (1993). Stroop interference: Aging effects assessed with the Stroop Colour-Word Test. Experimental Aging Research. 19 (3); 209–2 MacLeod, C.M., (1991) Half a century research on the Stroop Effect: an integrative review. Psychological Bulletin. 109; 163-203. Mitrushina, M.N., Boone, K.B., Razani, J. & D’Elia, L.F. (2005). Handbook of normative data for neuropsychological assessment. New York: Oxford University Press US. Perfect, T., (1997) Memory aging as frontal lobe dysfunction. In M. A. Conway (Ed.), Cognitive models of memory. (pp 315–339) Hove, United Kingdom : Psychology press Sarmany, L., (1977) Different performance in Stroop's interference test from the aspect of personality and sex. Studio Psychologica.19; 60-67. Read More

It is also seen that in monolinguals, the reaction span of students increased during the stoop experiments when the foreign language displayed similarity to the phonological resemblance to the language they used whereas during bilinguals, it was seen that while naming the colours, participants were slower and the language of the colour names were the same. (Dyer, 1971) Females are found to be faster in showing their reaction towards the Stroop tests and are more at the advantageous position when it comes to the identification and naming of the colours and it is on account of their response speed.

In a study conducted by Peter J. Houx, Jellemer Jolles and Fred W. Vreeling in 1993 regarding interference of stoop on aging and gender, it was found that the reaction time taken by the elderly population was more whereas their was no observation regarding the sex difference. The development of the Stroop tests can be undertaken as a part of the assessment tool in cases where there are chances of mild cognitive impairment in the geriatric population. It was generally seen that there had been a close correlation between the Mini Mental State Examination score and the activities depended on the Stroop effects and it was soon found that the Stroop effect could be used to diagnose forgetfulness and mild case of dementia.

(Hisashi, 2002) Certain studies have found that the Stroop test involves many kind of inconsistencies, though there have been many generalizations regarding the Stroop effect but studies like MacLeod in 1991 came out with the differences between boys and girls on the interference card, where as certain studies showed that men and women had not been able to display differential interferences, still other studies found that women had been more quicker on the Stroop colour word card test than men.

(Sarmany, 1977) Studies concerning the impact of the Stroop effect interferences are very less and the knowledge pertaining to the semantic interference in the stoop effect and its course development would help in the identification of the mild cognitive impairment. Some studies state that girls react faster than boys while some studies suggest that there is no gender difference during the process of naming the stoop colours. The aim of the study was to found out the gender differences, which is quite relevant during Stroop test.

Students in the class were given the A4 cards to identify and name the colours on the cards and it was hypothesized that girls’ reaction time towards the naming and identification of the colours is less than the boys. Method The study was undertaken by making use of the repeated measure design, whereby all the participants in an experiment undertake experience in all conditions. This solves the purpose by first allowing the participants themselves to take part in the action. The participants were divided into two parts, the first 10 participants were provided with the A4 cards listed with the alphabets A, B and C which was followed by the other lists D E and F, and then the rest of the 10 participants were provided with the lists D, E and F pursued by the lists A, B and C.

All the participants were made to enter the classroom near the library and they were given tests one at a time. They were given these different cards having four boxes with different colours but before that we assured ourselves that the students participating had a similar standard of intellectual ability. They were also made aware of the fact that this test was not conducted to test their general intelligence level and that there was neither right nor wrong answer. Inside the room along with me there was batch of 4 more participants, one was to record the time for each person on the chart and the other to make the record of the mistake for every one on the list on the separate chart and one having stop watch to calculate the time of the participant for each person on the list.

The test was marked by the scoring pattern, which was based on the time taken in seconds to give the name in colours.

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