The Stroop Effect: Background

The Stroop Effect began as a dissertation for John Ridley Stroop. This experiment originates in 1885 in work done by J.M. Cattel. He stated that colors and objects took longer to name the word. Both experimenters were interested to know what caused the interference was between conflicting processes. Once he made his research, Stroop wanted to explain the interference. His study was based on 2 major questions. What effect each of the dimension stimulus would have trying to name the other dimension? Would practice have an effect on the interference? He created 3 experiments. Experiment #1 studied the effect of different ink color on reading words aloud. The results of this experiment was that participants averaged 2.3 seconds longer to read the words with the incompatible ink color. On experiment #2 the task was changed to naming the ink color of the words aloud. This time it was the same order as in the first experiment but te shapes where substituted for words. The results Ridley Stroop got out of this experiment was that the participants averaged 47 seconds longer to name the ink color of incompatible words than to name the solid-colored shapes. On experiment #3, 32 participant were supposed to practice and name the ink color of incongruent words for 8 days. Ridley Stroop wanted to find out whether practice affected the results. The results for this experiment was that time on incompatible words decreased with practice. The conclusions were that practice did make a difference. Also, he concluded that naming words activated a single reading response, while colors activated more responses. Naming colors was much more difficult that reading them in words. The Stroop Effect is a difficulty or interference when naming the color of an object when the color interferes with the name of the object. The Stroop Effect also states that participants have a difficulty eliminated any irrelevant information during a task. There is a variation in the Stroop Effect and it is that it may be tested through various experiments. it has been manipulated in various ways by experimenters. There has been many variations since Ridley’s findings. Other people that have influenced the Stroop Effect are MacLeond, Hamers, Regan, Arnoult, McCown, Eriksen and Seymour. There are many limitations for these critical trials. For example, acoustic relations can alter the results. Also, the interference begins until around 2nd grade and declines through adulthood until around 60 and then rises again. It is also more powerful in the dominant language of bilinguals. The explanations for these findings are that words are that words are read faster than colors are named. Two responses compete to be the response that is produced. We automatically read a word when it is there for us to read and colors are everywhere and we do not necessarily say the color in our head every time we see a different color. in conclusion, this interference found when incongruent data is together makes it more challenging for us.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment. The patient believes the placebo is a normal pharmacological substance that will cure their pain and because they believe it will in some cases it does even if it is a tablet without effect. This idea was presented by H.K. Beecher who evaluated 15 clinical trials with different problems and found that 35% of the people he tested were cured by a placebo alone and 66.7% of the patient’s conditions were improved. Since then, many studies have been done with higher results. These placebos have been effective for people with any pain, depression, heart ailments, gastric ulcers and other stomach issues. Many other studies were done concerning the efficiency of the placebo effect and some discuss it does not really work. Before real pharmaceutics medicine was used, there were only placebos. The limitations of the placeboes are that sometimes doctors don’t know if maybe the placebo is not going to be effective and may worsen the patient’s health. I think that for minor health problems such as a cold or depression the placebo effect might be efficient but for major diseases it should not prescribed. The placebo effect can also have many beneficial results so it should not be discarded because it can still be very cheap and easier for many people but it should also me accompanied by other medicines so that it is not risky.

These articles explain how gender and cultural differences affect the way and how long we retain memory. For example, Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Sweden discovered that women can remember more about everyday events than men. The results of their experiments indicated that women do extremely well in verbal episodic memory tasks and men were better than woman at visuospatial processing. To get to these conclusions the psychologists made an experiment in which three groups of participants where presented with black and white pictures of hairless, asexual faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The results show that women could remember the ‘female’ faces better than they could remember the ‘male’ faces. This shows us how gender affects memory in different ways.

Psychologist, Michelle Leichtman, tries to explain how different cultures have particular factors that may shape memory. She ives many examples. One of them is that if you ask someone tha comes from the Unisted States, a country that focuses a lot in their history, about the earliest memory they have they might tell you about some event when they were about 3. But if you ask the same thing to an Asian, a culture that values independence more than personal history, they will probably tell you about a memory they have when they were 4 or more. So, according to this we can observe that how long you retain a memory may vary depending on your culture. These discoveries have been results of studies made in the past. Mary Mullen and Harlene Hayne both did studies trying to find how differences between cultures affect memory. Mullen asked 700 Caucasians and Asians about their earliest memory and found an average difference that Caucasians’ memory was 6 moths earlier than Asian’s. Then Hayne found that Maoris’ culture helped them retain memory longer than Caucasians. To explain this Michelle Leichthman and some colleagues investigates and found that high-elaborative mothers talk a lot to their children about the past, while low-elaborative mothers don’t talk much about the past. So, they found that Maori mothers are high-elaborative mothers compared to Asian mothers. This explains to us how culture can affect our memory.

Alzheimer’s disease is a problem in the brain that affects your memory. The symptoms develop slowly and get worse through the years to a point that it interferes with daily activities. This disease is progressive and irreversible it slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability of completing basic tasks. When the disease is advanced the patient can no longer respond to the environment, they might become mute or stop eating. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of aging but as you get older the possibilities if having the disease increase. Most patients with Alzheimer’s are 65 or older. Alzheimer’s is one of the leading causes of death in America, but the most frightening part of the disease is that there is no current cure. Although there is no cure, there are some treatments that help slow down the worsening symptoms and improve the quality of life for the patients. The most common early symptom is having difficulty remembering new information. As the disease develops other symptoms may appear such as forgetting basic things you have done for your whole life. Another example of a symptom of a patient in the severe stage of Alzheimer’s is that the person may not be able to recognize his father or daughter. This disease is one of the priorities for many labs; it has been killing people for many years and will keep on doing if scientists don’t find a cure for it. It may be terrifying but it is the true, Alzheimer’s is an average person’s fear of getting older.

Native Language Connects To Consumers' Emotions

In our world we are exposed to several languages each day. For example, television ads, billboards, ads, ect… All of these are presented in different languages. What authors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer, found out was that we perceive out native language more emotionally that foreign languages. These authors that studied bilingual and trilingual populations tested different slogans with consumers and found differences in how the messages were perceived. They reached the conclusion that it was not that they did not understand, or understood less the message in a second language, instead it had to do with memory. This means that the words in a consumer’s native language made the person unconsciously relate that word to a memory they had. Because we mostly have memories with words of our native language, the message containing that language we use the most and have most memories about is perceives more emotionally. Their tests also prove that this effect was found more on woman than men because woman have more efficient memory of emotions. This does not only help us understand why we feel more related to a message using our native language, but also this tells us that we should communicate to consumers using their native language because they will feel emotionally related.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm 

New Understanding Of How We Remember Traumatic Events

Neuroscientists and researchers at the University of Queensland discovered a theory that explains why it is so hard for us to forget traumatic events. The experiment consisted of many studies, lead by the Queensland Brain Institute,  of the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain associates with the processing of emotions. After several studies, scientists discovered a cellular mechanism causing the formation of memories doing with emotional events, which occurs with a certain stress hormone that is present in emotional events. Dr. Louis Faber and her colleagues in the University of Queensland also show how adrenaline in the brain controls the chemical and electrical pathways that are responsible for memory formation. That is why our deepest memories are snapshots of high emotional impact. The new mechanism discovered, helps us understand how these memories are formed. Also, the discovery opens doors to further investigation of anxiety disorders and post-traumatic disorders. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028103111.html

Some short memories Die Suddenly instead of Fading Away

This experiment was conducted by researchers of the UC Davis Center for mind and brain. What researchers Weiwei Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Steve Luck, a professor of psychology, were trying to prove was that short memories dies suddenly and did not fade away as scientists have thought for decades. Their experiment consisted of two tests, each given to 12 adults. On the first one, 3 different colored squares flashed in the computer. Then a color wheel appeared and the three squares also appeared but this time they were colorless and one was highlighted. Afterwards, the subject was asked to recall the color of the highlighted square and was asked to click on the area of the wheel that matched the color. They repeated this 150 times. The results were that the people that did remember the color clicked very close to the color in the wheel and for the ones that the color had disappeared from their memory, clicked on a random color. This means that memory does not fade away instead it goes away suddenly. The second test was similar but it used shapes instead of colors. Luck said, “[They] either had the memory or didn’t have the memory. The memories did not gradually fade away”. This information helps us understand about memory retention and formation. And it is basic for everyday life because it provides a mechanism to help us avoid the confusion while trying to make decisions based on weak memories. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm