Contextual victimization is associated with slower inhibition control: A pictorial violence-Stroop study carried out in Juárez, Mexico.

Contextual victims are those individuals who are indirectly traumatized by the physical and sociocultural conditions of their violent communities through second-hand information. The purpose of this study was to examine the inhibitory control to violent stimuli in contextual victims from the city of Juárez, Mexico. A pictorial violence-Stroop was constructed with violent, positive, and neutral images. Forty-six university students with low (n = 22) and high (n = 24) scores on the Community Victimization by Community Violence Questionnaire participated. The study adopted a 2 (group = high contextual victims and low contextual victims) × 3 (stimulus type = violent, positive, and neutral) factorial design with repeated measures on the second factor. There were two significant effects which favored the low-context compared with the high-context victimization group, notably faster reaction times in the violent stimulus condition (968.93 vs. 1136.26 ms; H = 5.031; p = .024) and the neutral stimulus condition (899.68 vs. 1013 ms; H = 5.130; p = .025). Results suggest that individuals who are highly exposed to contextual violence may be more sensitive towards violent stimuli, and that their performance on inhibitory tasks that include violence as a distractor cue may be more cognitively demanding.