Stroop color coding and the relationship of personality in performance : An experimental study on Stroop color coding controlling for personality traits

Sammanfattning: The Stroop Color coding and word test (Stroop, 1935) is a well-known phenomenon investigating cognitive inhibition, cognitive speed, attention and cognitive flexibility. The Stroop effect refers when processing a stimulus while being exposed to another stimuli simultaneous interfering with the first (Scarpina & Tagini, 2017). This study focuses on a performance part of the Stroop color coding and word test and its relation to personality traits in the HEAXCO-PR using the Mini-IPIP6 (Ashton & Lee, 2007; Sibely, 2012). An experiment was conducted with the control group ( N = 30 ) solving a Stroop color coding and word test and the experiment group ( N = 30) being exposed to two stimuli (audio and visual) with purpose to induce stress. The result of an independent t-test indicated that you can manipulate the result of a Stroop test measuring two outcome variables (Time and Error). One-way MANCOVA was performed with the personality traits used as covariates. The analysis indicated that Extraversion had a significant small impact on Time (F (1,52) = 6.872, p = .011 η2 = .117) ) and Openness had an effect on Error (F (1,52) = 3.167, p = .008 η2 = .057). Openness showed a significant effect on error rate in the performance. Extraversion showed significant effect as a covariate on the completion time of the test. Time and Error showed a significant correlation. To establish the relationship between cognitive inhibition and personality more research is required. More research is also required for the result of this theoretical study to potentially become applicable.