Emotional Stroop Test — Free Online Attentional Bias Task

Words appear one at a time in the middle of the screen. Half are emotional words such as ‘failure’ or ‘lonely’, half are everyday objects such as ‘desk’ or ‘window’. Ignore the meaning and tap the button that matches the ink colour of the letters — one of four: red, green, blue or yellow. Each trial gives you 1.5 seconds, shown by a bar that fills up beneath the word; if you don't answer in time it counts as a miss, and as soon as you answer the next word appears. There is no separate practice round: all 32 trials run back to back, and the whole test, instructions included, takes about 2 minutes.

The word lists are written separately for each language. They use 8 emotional and 8 neutral words, each shown twice, giving 16 trials per condition, and the four ink colours are balanced so that each appears exactly 4 times within each condition. The order is shuffled anew every time, with the rule that the same word never appears twice in a row. Because colours and counts are matched across the two conditions, a difference in speed between them can be traced to the emotional meaning of the words rather than to the colours.

The large number at the top is how many of the 32 trials you got right — how accurately you picked the colour without being thrown by the meaning. The line below it shows your emotional attentional bias in ms. The detailed report lists accuracy and average reaction time separately for emotional and neutral words, and the averages are based on correct responses only. If either condition has fewer than 4 correct answers, the average would be too unstable, so the bias is shown as not measurable. Keep in mind, too, that the graph comparing you with other people is still based on a provisional reference estimate.

With only 16 trials per condition, a hesitation or two can move an average by tens of milliseconds. If the moment you glanced at a notification or your finger hunted for a button happens to fall on emotional words, the bias looks bigger; if it falls on neutral words, it looks smaller. Your reading speed in the test language, screen size and the distance to the buttons, touch versus mouse, any difficulty telling colours apart, and fatigue all play a part as well. Trials you get wrong by rushing drop out of the averages, so protecting accuracy over speed makes the result steadier.

The Emotional Stroop is a research paradigm adapted from the classic Stroop task. Williams, Mathews and MacLeod (1996) reviewed how it had been used in psychopathology research, discussing the tendency for colour naming to slow down on words linked to whatever a person is currently preoccupied with. In research it is mostly used to compare group averages, conditions or changes over time, not to put a label on an individual. Soundary's version uses general negative-emotion words that are the same for everyone rather than personal worry words, so it gives a light-touch picture of how much emotion in general pulls on your attention.

On Soundary, when your bias comes out at 40 ms or more, the recommendations below the result move the mood and anxiety self-checks to the front, because how strongly emotional words hold your attention says more when it is read alongside your mood. Results are saved, so if you take the test again later you can compare it with your previous result. Still, a single value is a snapshot of that day's tendency, not a verdict, and comparisons become more meaningful when you repeat it on the same device, at a similar time of day and in a comfortable posture.