Stroop test automatized for smoking risk among teenagers

Abstract

A Stroop discriminative test was built to assess interference produced by words associated to tobacco use among teenagers. In the first phase of the study 473 junior high school students, men and women, wrote positive and negative words related to smoking or to tobacco, and neutral words not associated to the subject. Fifteen of the most frequent positive, negative and associated words were selected to create pairs with neutral words equal in length and frequency of use. Three versions of the computerized smoking risk Stroop test were built based upon selected dyads, by varying the order of the blocks. In the second phase of the study, 164 junior high school students, men and women, were exposed to the discriminative task, in which they had to press the number identifying the color in which the word was written on the screen. Order of the blocks did not affect interference indexes. Negative interferences correlated significantly with associated neutral words interference, but not with positive interference. It is concluded that the Stroop test for smoking risk assesses attentional bias related to smoking and to tobacco among adolescents, and that either order of block is equivalent for practical use.