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Research on color-naming dates back to Cattell (1886), but Stroop (1935) is most often credited with beginning the widespread inclusion of colors and words into a single task. As of 1991, there were more than 700 manuscripts published on Stroop effects (MacLeod, 1991). For almost two decades, various modifications of Stroop color-naming tests have been used to investigate psychopathology (Williams et al., 1996), primarily anxiety disorders.

One of the original Stroop tasks required subjects to name the color of words printed in antagonistic colors as quickly as possible, ignoring the word content itself (Stroop, 1935). The incongruence of the word and printed color leads to a slowing of response, apparently with increased cognitive processing, measured by an increased latency between presentation of the word and its verbal recognition. Later versions of the Stoop task were developed to measure interference in …