1. The Emotions Stroop: An Ability Measure of Emotional Attention Regulation
Hillary Anger Elfenbein
Daisung Jang
Sudeep Sharma
Washington University in Saint Louis
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks
University of Michigan 1

2. Need to Develop New Measures of EI
Trait-based (mixed-model) measures of EI are confounded, fakeable, and conceptually muddled (Roberts, MacCann, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2010)
The dominant ability-based measures suffer from issues with consensus scoring
‘Consensus’ is not synonymous with ‘correct’
‘Consensus’ scoring does not allow detection of emotional genius!
As I discussed in the start of the symposium, there’s a need for ability based measures of EI with truly correct (and incorrect answers).
Self-reporting EI is questionable because self-reports of EI seem to be confounded by personality, they can be faked, and they’re conceptually muddled as a concept.
The dominant ability based measures suffer from subjectivity because of consensus scoring.
That’s because consensus is not the same as correct;- perhaps the most vivid way to demonstrate this is that with consensus based scoring, you’d never be able to detect emotional geniuses who provide responses no-one else would have thought of.

3. Emotion Attention Regulation
Regulating attention to emotion-laden stimuli
Tuning in: Can you tune into nonverbal cues of emotion when other stimuli distract you?
Tuning out: Can you avoid the influence of nonverbal cues of emotion when they are distracting you from the task at hand?
Conceptually distinct, but we found were correlated
Similar but not identical to emotion regulation
Not about adjusting your internal affective experience
About paying attention to the affective landscape
So what we did was to try to develop an ability based measure of emotion regulation.
With this measure, we thought about emotion regulation in two ways -
Can you tune into nonverbal cues of emotion when other stimuli distract you? Or, as we call it – turning emotions on
And can you avoid being influenced by nonverbal cues of emotion when they are distraction you from the task at hand? Or as we call it – turning emotions off
Armed with this idea, we tried to create a measure which does not feature the flaws of self-report, and one in which people can display objectively better or worse performance.

4. Inspiration from the Stroop Effect
Name the color of the ink…
A measure of attentional ability
Difference in reaction times (RT) indicate ability to focus on relevant information and ignore distractions
BLUE RED GREEN
BLUE RED GREEN
We drew inspiration from a classic measure in cognitive psychology – the Stroop task.
I won’t make you do it, but if I ask you to name the color of the ink in these words, it’s fairly easy.
But if I change the colors and the words around so they look like this…
It becomes a much harder task. It’s hard not to day the words.
In cognitive psychology, this task is used as a measure of attentional ability because it is an indicator of an ability to focus on task relevant information and ignore distractions.

5. Our Emotions ‘Stroop’ Extending the Stroop into emotion ability
Present pairs of affect cues that potentially distract
Visual and audio versions
Audio – positive/negative words in positive/negative vocal tones (POSITIVE vs. NEGATIVE): valence
Visual – happy/angry faces in green/red color (STOP vs. GO): approach-avoidance
Distinct from previous ‘emotions Stroops’
They used emotion-stimuli paired with colors, not emotion as the medium itself
What we did was to knock this off in our ‘emotional stroop’.
What we did was to present pairs of affect-related cues that are potentially distracting, and to create a distraction score that captures a person’s ability to filter out task irrelevant information, like in the stroop.
We did this for both visual and audio stimuli, where…

6. Turning Emotions On for Faces
If the emotion is happy, click “GO”
If the emotion is angry, click “STOP”
To give you an idea of what this looks like in practice….

7. Turning Emotions Off for Faces
If the color is green, click “GO”
If the color is red, click “STOP”

8. Turning Emotions On for Voices
If the vocal tone is positive, click “POSITIVE”
If the vocal tone is negative, click “NEGATIVE”
For the audio version of the stroop, we presented people with recordings of positively or negatively valenced words read in a happy or sad vocal tone.

9. Turning Emotions Off for Voices
If the word is positive, click “POSITIVE”
If the word is negative, click “NEGATIVE”

10. Scoring EAR Examined errors on incompatible responses
Original Stroop test used reaction time
Generally, cognitive psychology research on interference tasks finds better properties for analyzing errors on distracted trials
Our results were consistent with this empirical observation
So after the stroops, we calculate a distraction score. We calculate the extent to which people are able to regulate emotional cues.
For turning emotions on, which is the ability to recognize emotions filtering out or harnessing emotion related cues, we take the average of the reaction times to the incompatible stimuli, and subtract the average of the reaction times to the compatible stimuli.
So a higher score is a relative inability to correctly recognize emotions.
For turning emotions off, which is the ability to recognize approach or avoidance related cues, filtering out or harnessing emotions, we group the reaction times according to the valence, by subtracting the negative stimuli by the positive stimuli. So a high distraction score is the extent to which people are slow to react to positively valenced stimuli.
Following conventions with the color-word stroop, we analyze only correct responses, and we also used Z-scores – the recommended procedure for studying individual differences.

11. Study Design Study 1: Test for reliability Study 2: Test for validity
Emotion Stroop twice, one week apart; one group double-length
N=122, Age M=19.3, 55 female
Life satisfaction & DANVA
Big 5, life satisfaction, DANVA, mindfulness, Law-Wong-Song EI, and color-word Stroop
Study 2: Test for validity
Emotion Stroop once
N=157, Age M=18.8, 82 female
Study 3: Additional tests for validity
MBA students took the Emotion Stroop once
Assessments included EI battery, peer-rated EI, GMAT, Big 5

12. Promising Reliability
‘Positive manifold’ across the 4 components
i.e., tuning in and tuning out, faces and voices
Average r=.20s
Test-retest reliability at one week r=.62
Split-half reliability r=.64

13. Promising Validity Converges with many other EI measures
Observer-rated EI (-.30)
DANVA faces (-.26), STEM (-.20)
Not DANVA voices (-.06), STEU (-.04), MSCEIT (.04)
Self-reported EI slightly with WLEIS (-.11), not SREIS (.01)
Converges with cognitive ability (-.20, small sample)
Diverges from general processing speed (.00)
Diverges from personality and trait affect
Except neuroticism (.13), agreeableness (-.10), anxiety (.13)
Predictive validity for subjective well-being (-.19)
No consistent gender difference (-.22 to .10, M=.06)