The Stroop Effect

Standing Up Increases Psychological Stress
Frequently, the environment competes for our attention. It is in our human nature to focus all of our attention on a single stimuli, in order to get things done. However, there may come a time where we catch ourselves multitasking, yet we get easily distracted and seem to lose that divided attention. Generally, attention is limited, we only have so much to disburse at once or on one particular thing. Several things affect our ability to use our attention, and one major attention-grabber is stress. According to Dhabhar (2014), “the concept of stress has earned a bad reputation, the adaptive purpose of a physiological stress response is to promote survival during fight or flight”. Long-term stress is …show more content…
The Stroop effect is a phenomenon where a person is shown a word in a specific color and must say the color of the word but not the name of the word. In a study that uses the Stroop Effect, the researchers experimented with three different groups to see how sitting down and/or standing up effected their response to the Stroop test. Rosenbaum, Mama, and Algom (2017) had participants in Experiment 1 respond by speaking the name of the print color they saw the words appear into a microphone. They had participants in Experiment 2 respond by pressing a pair of lateralized keys on a computer keyboard. The three researchers had participants in Experiment 3 do the same thing as the participants in experiment one. Their findings concluded that “the responses were faster when participants were standing than when they were sitting” (Rosenbaum, et al, 2017). Even though the Stroop Effect gave evidence that standing up does cause stress, and stress demands a high percent of our attention, do all forms of stress affect our attention? For example, does psychological stress affect our attention? Those important questions can be answered by asking people to report their psychological stress that they are experiencing. We can also ask them to do a Stroop task and record the different positions in which they are either standing or …show more content…
Putting all of our body weight onto our two feet, recruits more attention, which leads us with less attention to disburse. When we stand, if our attention focuses more on the physical movement of our body, the “task-irrelevant” information will receive less attention, and will become more likely to take longer to respond to. Given the results obtained by Rosenbaum, Mama, and Algom (2017), and the fact that standing demands a lot of attention and causes physiological stress, we expect that standing would lead to a smaller Stroop

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