The emotional stroop paradigm in the study of tobacco counterpublicity cognitive processing

The aim of this work is to analyze the attentional and mnesic processing of words related to smoking and health using the emotional stroop paradigm and a bigram completing task. A modified stroop task consisting of three types of words: neutral, smoking related words and health related words extracted from health warnings messages presented in smoking publicity, was given to a sample integrated by smokers, non-smokers and former-smokers. The individuals performed then an implicit memory task. The results obtained indicated that the health related words are not preferentially attended by the smokers. However, they complete more bigrams with tobacco words than the other groups. The relevance of this memory bias in the context of smoking counterpublicity and of stop-smoking therapy is discussed.