“Distracters” Do Not Always Distract: Visual Working Memory for Angry Faces is Enhanced by Incidental Emotional Words

Abstract

We are often required to filter out distraction in order to focus on a primary task during which working memory (WM) is engaged. Previous research has shown that negative versus neutral distracters presented during a visual WM maintenance period significantly impair memory for neutral information. However, the contents of WM are often also emotional in nature. The question we address here is how incidental information might impact upon visual WM when both this and the memory items contain emotional information. We presented emotional versus neutral words during the maintenance interval of an emotional visual WM faces task. Participants encoded two angry or happy faces into WM, and several seconds into a 9 s maintenance period a negative, positive, or neutral word was flashed on the screen three times. A single neutral test face was presented for retrieval with a face identity that was either present or absent in the preceding study array. WM for angry face identities was significantly better when an emotional (negative or positive) versus neutral (or no) word was presented. In contrast, WM for happy face identities was not significantly affected by word valence. These findings suggest that the presence of emotion within an intervening stimulus boosts the emotional value of threat-related information maintained in visual WM and thus improves performance. In addition, we show that incidental events that are emotional in nature do not always distract from an ongoing WM task.

Angry expressions strengthen the encoding and maintenance of face identity representations in visual working memory

“…It is important to note that we do not claim here that angry face representations do not decay at all in WM, but that decay might be more gradual, or have less impact on the precision of representations in WM at the point of retrieval compared to happy face representations. The lack of an anger-enhancement effect when a 9 second maintenance interval was used in previous work (Jackson et al, 2012) indicates clearly that the benefit to WM afforded by anger is lost over longer periods of time. It would be interesting for future study to try to ascertain in more detail the time-course of decay for angry and happy faces and the impact on representational precision.…”

“…Recent work provides evidence that the valence of task-irrelevant intervening information can influence WM for emotional stimuli. Jackson, Linden, and Raymond (2012) found that when the WM maintenance period was protracted to 9 seconds, the angry versus happy benefit observable with a 1 second maintenance period (Jackson et al, 2009) was abolished. However, when a task-irrelevant emotional (positive or negative) word was presented during maintenance, WM for the identity of angry faces was boosted (relative to when a neutral or no word was presented), resulting in the re-instatement of the angerenhancement effect.…”

The cost of facing fear: Visual working memory is impaired for faces expressing fear

“…In contrast, previously observed facilitatory effects of emotion may operate more rapidly, potentially increasing the precision with which emotional stimuli can be encoded (Jackson et al ., ). Consistent with this possibility, the size of the VWM advantage for angry faces is reduced when longer encoding times are allowed (Jackson et al ., ), and it is eliminated when a long retention interval is used (Jackson, Linden, & Raymond, ). A long retention interval may allow competitive or other interference effects to accumulate to a larger degree.…”

Adaptation to Emotional Conflict: Evidence from a Novel Face Emotion Paradigm

“…Presentation of emotional faces versus emotional words showed quantitatively different levels of interference in individuals induced to feel sad mood, with the verbal domain showing more attentional interference than face domain [26]. Incongruent emotional word distractors can also disproportionately bias recall of certain emotional faces, with increased recall for angry faces paired with emotional words (whether positive or negative) relative to angry faces paired with neutral or no words [27]. Finally, repetition effects that influence subsequent memory performance differ for face and word stimuli [28], with repetition seeming to influence memory for lexical stimuli more than face stimuli.…”