the classic and the emotional Stroop tasks involve the need to suppress responses to distracting word information, while selectively maintaining attention on the color of the word to complete the task. However, the emotional Stroop task has been used broadly in clinical studies using emotional words related to a particular individual's area of concern, such as alcohol-related words for someone who is alcoholic, or words involving a particular phobia for someone with anxiety or phobic disorders. The emotional Stroop task has been used to assess the risk for suicide college students. It has been examined in relation to veterans with PTSD; those with PTSD had slower response times to words related to the disorder than neutral or unrelated negative words when compared to veterans without PTSD. The emotional Stroop task has also been used to examine participants with Body Dysmorphic Disorder Gender & Age Differences It has been shown that there are differences in performance on the emotional Stoop task when comparing across genders and age groups. However, findings examining these differences are mixed. For example, in a study examining how older adults and younger adults differ in speed of responses on an emotional Stroop task containing both emotional words and faces, both younger and older adults took longer to respond to stimuli when asked to identify positive words paired with negative faces. This suggests that there is no difference among older and younger adults. Other studies have found different results, with results suggesting that older adults are more affected by negative words in the emotional Stoop task than younger adults. In terms of gender differences between men and women, it has been shown that females perform worse than men when it comes to responding to aggressive words but only marginally so. Controversy notice The emotional Stroop test requires naming the colour of a word without reading the word as described earlier; however a flaw in this study design was investigated by Larsen & Balota, 2006. This study showed that slower word recognition cannot be solely attributed to whether a word is emotional or not, and that lexical features could also explain this slowing. All emotion words used in the published studies evaluated were significantly longer in length, less frequently used, and had smaller orthographic neighbourhoods than control words. Thus the contribution of lexical characteristics to results of an emotional Stroop test should be considered when used in research. Also,