474This study demonstrates six interrelated effects of emotion on attention and memory. The main one is the taboo Stroop effect: When people name the color of randomly intermixed taboo and neutral words, color-naming times are longer for taboo than for neutral words (Siegrist, 1995). The taboo Stroop effect shares characteristics with two other effects, known as the clinical and the emotional Stroop effects. The clinical Stroop effect occurs when patients with a particular affective disorder (e.g., spiderphobia) name the colors of words that are either phobia related (e.g., web) or phobia unrelated (e.g., wet): Colornaming times are longer for the patients than for the normal controls, but only for the phobia-related words (e.g., Dalgleish & Watts, 1990;Mathews & MacLeod, 1985;Richards & Millwood, 1989;Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Tresize, 1986). However, unlike taboo Stroop effects, which are robust across experimental contexts and are not confined to individuals suffering from clinical disorders, clinical Stroop effects (for a review, see Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996) are often small, difficult to replicate (see MacLeod & Hodder, 1998), context specific (e.g., readily observable with blocked, but not with randomly intermixed, emotional and unemotional words; see Richards, French, Johnson, Naparstek, & Williams, 1992), and variable (e.g., holding for some types of clinical traits and emotional disorders, but not for others; see Matthews & Harley, 1996).A closer relative of the taboo Stroop effect is the emotional Stroop effect, the fact that people take longer to name the color of unpleasant words (e.g., grief, fail, fear, and death) than that of neutral words (see, e.g., Sharma & McKenna, 2001;Whalen et al., 1998). Unlike taboo Stroop effects, time pressure (240 msec or less between prior response and subsequent color word) may be essential for observing emotional Stroop effects (see Sharma & McKenna, 2001). Moreover, the label emotional Stroop effect may be inappropriate: Repeated failures to demonstrate emotional Stroop effects for pleasant words suggest that negative affect, rather than emotionality per se, may underlie emotional Stroop effects (see McKenna & Sharma, 1995;Richards & Millwood, 1989). Despite these complications, clinical and emotional Stroop effects have stimulated development of a global resource theory of emotion and attention, which we will outline next in order to frame the general issues that motivated the present experiments.Under the theory, emotional reactions "soak up processing resources" (Bower, 1992, p. 17), and clinical and emotional Stroop effects occur when limited-capacity attentional resources are allocated to threatening stimuli, thereby reducing resources available for processing and responding to other stimuli (e.g., font color). If one applies this basic logic to taboo words, by attracting attentional resources, taboo words will slow down color naming, rela- This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and a...

In 2 experiments, participants named pictures while ignoring auditory word distractors. For pictures with homophone names (e.g., ball), distractors semantically related to the nondepicted meaning (e.g., prom) facilitated naming by top-down phonological connections for young but not for older adults. Slowing from unrelated distractors and facilitation from phonologically related distractors were age invariant except in distractors that were both semantically and phonologically related. Only distractors semantically related to the picture interfered more for older than younger adults. These results are inconsistent with age-linked deficits in inhibition of irrelevant information from either internal or external sources. Rather, aging affects priming transmission in a connectionist network with asymmetric effects on semantic and phonological connections involved in comprehension and production, respectively. 1 Age-related deficits in comprehension are obtained in conditions in which language is presented in degraded form (e.g., Carlson et al., 1995; Schneider, Daneman, Murphy, & Kwong See, 2000), or language must be retained for correct responding (Light, 1992). These age differences may be attributable to older adults' general decline in sensory processes (e.g., Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994) and decline in memory for new information (MacKay & Burke, 1990), respectively, rather than to a decline in a language process.

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