Vicissitudes of a misnomer: Reply to Dalgleish (2005)

The Stroop effect is psycholo.-y's classic measure gauging the selectivity of attention to individual attributes of complex stimuli. The emotional Stroop effect gauges the influence on behavior of threat and emotional stimuli. The former taps central/executive processes abstracted from particular stimulus contexts, whereas the latter taps automatic processes inextricably linked to particular stimuli in the environment. T. Dalgleish (2005) raised concerns about the data and theory that support the separateness of the 2 effects (D. Algom, E. Chajut, & S. Lev, 2004). The present reply shows that Dalgleish's objections are unwarranted and that the term emotional Stroop effect blurs the deep conceptual divide separating the 2 phenomena.