Date

2013

Author

Aruntaş, Meryem Arzu

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Emotional, cognitive and physical attitudes of children reshape when they reach adolescence. According to the literature, maturation of response inhibition, an important component of conflict resolution begins stabilizing at approximately 14 years, and adult levels of processing speed is reached at 15 years old. To the best of our knowledge there exists no study that measures adolescent performance in a Turkish population for conflict resolution. In this study, we wanted to explore how adolescents handle emotional conflicts by developing a task in which affective facial expressions displayed on the background create congruent or incongruent conditions with respect to the emotional load of the Turkish words displayed on the foreground. In this new “Word-face Stroop” experiment, conflicts between emotional words and emotional facial expressions should be suppressed in order to indicate whether the given word is positive, negative or neutral. Another task, the classical Stroop task is also administered as a basic test to measure performance for cognitive conflict resolution. Our expectations were that the adolescents between 14-16 years of age will be able to achieve resolving emotional conflicts. We also expected that the control group, young adults, will show better performance than adolescents in terms of response time and number of correct responses. As a result, in both group of subjects, and in both classical and Word-face Stroop tasks, significant congruency effect has been detected such that response times were faster and number of correct responses were larger for congruent cases compared to incongruent cases. However, there were no significant differences between adolescents and young adults in terms of both performance metrics, namely response times and correct responses. Thus, our first hypothesis was confirmed: the adolescents between 14-16 years-old (middle adolescent) could achieve resolving emotional conflicts. We also found that adolescents‟ behavioral results have reached adult-level performance. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that investigates the emotional Stroop effect in a Turkish adolescent population.

Subject Keywords

Neuropsychological tests., Psychological tests., Adolescent psychology., Emotions.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12615878/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/22542

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis