Emotion regulation has taken on a growing role in the study of psychopathology, both in research as a process, and as a part of a treatment. The interest in emotion regulation has led to an increase in the assessment of this construct, primarily with explicit measures of emotion regulation. However, explicit measures are limited in that they are retrospective, subject to response biases, and impacted by method effects. Further, explicit measures only assess single strategies of emotion regulation at a time. Implicit measures of emotion regulation are not subject to these limitations. One implicit measure of emotion regulation is Etkin’s Emotional Conflict Task, which conceptually follows the Stroop task. The current study utilized the Emotional Conflict Task, but examined psychopathology dimensionally instead of categorically. This allowed for more precise assessment of psychopathology and increased statistical power, without the loss of information inherent to categorical assessment. Until now, the Emotional Conflict Task has only been examined in a few clinical samples, and only with very small sample sizes. This study examined convergent and divergent validity of the Emotional Conflict Task as well as incremental validity over current measures of emotion regulation. Sixty outpatients with anxiety and mood disorders completed the Emotional Conflict Task and a standard battery of questionnaires, along with a semi-structured diagnostic assessment, as part of their intake assessment when presenting for assessment and treatment at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Convergent validity of the Emotional Conflict Task was assessed by correlating it with two explicit measures of emotion regulation. Next, hierarchical regression was used to examine incremental validity of the Emotional Conflict Task, specifically the amount of variability in functional impairment accounted for, as measured by the Work and Social Adjustment Scale. Finally, this measure was correlated with dimensional measures of psychopathology and temperament to assess the differential relations between these constructs. Results indicated that the Emotional Conflict Task did not correlate with explicit measures of emotion regulation, was not predictive of functional impairment, and was not correlated with dimensional measures of psychopathology or temperament. Potential causes for these null findings and future directions are discussed.

Conflict resolution is essential for human cognitive system which renders adaptability to the environment, providing humans to fulfill daily activities. The main aim of this thesis is to create a task where the conflict activates emotional networks exclusively, while investigating how the cognitive and emotional conflicts are monitored and then resolved in the brain. After creating the appropriate material composed of controlled words in terms of emotional dimensions and concreteness values, a new Word-face Stroop Task is designed using Turkish words. Firstly subjects participated in a classical Stroop task to measure cognitive conflict and then in the Word-face Stroop task, the conflict between emotional words and emotional faces is investigated. The same Stroop tasks are then administered to depression patients. The results of the classical Stroop replicated the previous findings: (1) Healthy population was slower in responding to incongruent cases than congruent cases (2) Depressed patients were significantly slower than healthy population. The Word-face Stroop, conducted on healthy population also replicated the earlier findings: (1) People were slower in reacting to incongruent stimuli than congruent stimuli (2) People reacted faster to positive words than negative ones. Same Stroop tasks conducted on depressed patients however revealed interesting results, novel to the literature: (1) Congruency scores were significantly different when healthy population and Depressive Disorder patients with Hamilton scores higher than 20 were compared (2) Patients with Hamilton scores higher than 20 and lower than 20 significantly differed in congruency scores (3) Patients showed a tendency to react faster to incongruent stimuli rather than congruent stimuli, contrary to normal population (4) Normal population showed greater congruency effect in positively valenced abstract words, whereas depression patients showed greater congruency effect in negatively valenced concrete words.