Critique of Term Paper Article

Becker, Margraf, Rinck, and Roth wrote one of the articles that I found, the emotional Stroop effect in anxiety disorders: General emotionality or disorder specificity? The main idea of the research study is to understand cognitive attention predispositions by demonstrating Stroop task with anxiety participants. Stroop task were repeatedly uses on patients that have anxiety or other disorders such as panic, obsessive-compulsive, social phobia, and posttraumatic stress disorders. Their study is an expansion of other studies that involve Stroop tasks and anxiety patients. This study is very important because it will explain more about why the reaction time is slower or different with specific incongruent threatening words for anxiety or other disorder that patients may have.
In Becker at al. (2001) study, their hypothesis is to find and understand the role of each concerns, emotionality, and specificity in Stroop effect interference. In addition, they want to find the explanation for general emotionality such as positive or negative and schema congruency or specificity. They’re expecting to find that between two groups, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and social phobia (SP), GAD group would name broad topic incongruent words slower than SP group and their name-timing with social-related topic incongruent words. They expect to find that GAD participants would have attentional bias toward broader topics than SP participants.
Becker at al. (2001) method that they conducted for their study consists of 32 GAD patients, 29 SP patients, and 31 control participants that don’t have any type of disorder. It was taken place at VA Palo Alto Health Care System Hospital, Palo Alto, CA. Those patients completed the experiment that the resear...

... middle of paper ...

...or specific anxiety; in this case, social phobia.
I really do enjoy reading this article and I believe that it does make sense for GAD group to have a slightly higher time compared to other groups. GAD group typically have a broader range/level or anxiety while SP group have a specific anxiety, which is, social phobia. I think they should had another group to the experiment, I highly suggest to something related to bugs, darkness, height, or such. It would definitely favor attentional bias in the schema congruency hypothesis. I would love to extend this research by adding more groups and most likely gear toward to schema congruency hypothesis.

Works Cited

Becker, E. S., Margraf, J., Rinck, M., & Roth, W. T. (2001). The emotional Stroop effect in anxiety disorders: General emotionality or disorder specificity? Journal of
Anxiety Disorders, 15(3), 147-159.