Test–retest reliability and task order effects of emotional cognitive tests in healthy subjects

Abstract

Little is known of the retest reliability of emotional cognitive tasks or the impact of using different tasks employing similar emotional stimuli within a battery. We investigated this in healthy subjects. We found improved overall performance in an emotional attentional blink task (EABT) with repeat testing at one hour and one week compared to baseline, but the impact of an emotional stimulus on performance was unchanged. Similarly, performance on a facial expression recognition task (FERT) was better one week after a baseline test, though the relative effect of specific emotions was unaltered. There was no effect of repeat testing on an emotional word categorising, recall and recognition task. We found no difference in performance in the FERT and EABT irrespective of task order. We concluded that it is possible to use emotional cognitive tasks in longitudinal studies and combine tasks using emotional facial stimuli in a single battery.

Towards an emotional stress test: a reliable, non-subjective cognitive measure of anxious responding

“…threat of shock) on this task, is considerably more reliable than the emotional manipulation (i.e. emotional stimuli) on the emotional Stroop and dot probe tasks (Adams et al, 2015;Kindt et al, 1996)(see Table 1).…”

“…Emotional Stroop -0.17 (Anxiety -Neutral) 'Reliability coefficient' (Strauss, Allen, Jorgensen, & Cramer, 2005) 0.29 (Standard Stroop interference) Pearson's r (Kindt, Bierman, & Brosschot, 1996) Dot probe -.04 (Self-relevant positive words) 'Reliability coefficient' (Siegrist, 1997) 0.04 (Social threat words) 'Reliability coefficient' (Schmukle, 2005) 0.13 (Negative unmasked) Two way mixed ICC (Adams et al, 2015) Method Fifty healthy participants (25 female, mean age = 26.5, SD = 8.47), completed the SART in two testing sessions, separated by a period of between two and four weeks. Twenty two participants (11 female, mean age = 28.5, SD = 11.00) completed the task for the third time in a follow up session between five and nine months later.…”

Towards an emotional ‘stress test’: a reliable, non-subjective cognitive measure of anxious responding

“…threat of shock) on this task, is considerably more reliable than the emotional manipulation (i.e. emotional stimuli) on the emotional Stroop and dot probe tasks1213(see Table 1). …”

A study of wrist-worn activity measurement as a potential real-world biomarker for late-life depression

“…Subjects underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery during the study period consisting of: a digit span (DS) task, a digit symbol substitution task (DSST), a computer-administered facial emotion processing task (FERT; Adams et al 2015), the two-part Trail Making task (TMA, TMB), the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning task (RAVL), the FAS verbal fluency task (FAS), and four tasks from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB): paired associates learning (PAL), spatial span (SSP), spatial working memory (SWM), affective go/no-go (AGN). Pen-and-paper tasks were administered according to standardized instructions.…”