5.3.3. Experiment 3

We suggested that in low competition situations between task-irrelevant emotional stimuli and target stimuli, such as in Experiment 1, the attentional pattern to emotional stimuli in normal participants can be readily ascertained. In a direct processing competition condition, such as in the original emotional Stroop task, an emotional stimulus could be ignored in the operation of target processing and produce no specific effect of emotional valence. In Experiment 3, we tested this suggestion by varying ISI levels between emotional faces and colour patches, then compared colour-naming latencies across two ISIs: 90 and 0 ms. Although an ISI of 0 ms does not set up direct competition between two processing operations, it can lead to relatively higher competition levels than a 90-ms ISI. Trials in Experiment 3 were divided into three blocks to analyze the interaction of block and emotional face that we observed in Experiment 1.