Effects of emotional content on working memory capacity

Abstract

Emotional events tend to be remembered better than neutral events, but emotional states and stimuli may also interfere with cognitive processes that underlie memory performance. The current study investigated the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity (WMC), which involves both short term storage and executive attention control. We tested competing hypotheses in a preregistered experiment (N = 297). The emotional enhancement hypothesis predicts that emotional stimuli attract attention and additional processing resources relative to neutral stimuli, thereby making it easier to encode and store emotional information in WMC. The emotional impairment hypothesis, by contrast, predicts that emotional stimuli interfere with attention control and the active maintenance of information in working memory. Participants completed a common measure of WMC (the operation span task; Turner, M. L., & Engle, R. W. [1989]. Is working memory capacity task dependent? Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 127-154) that included either emotional or neutral words. Results revealed that WMC was reduced for emotional words relative to neutral words, consistent with the emotional impairment hypothesis.

Differences in Working Memory With Emotional Distraction Between Proficient and Non-proficient Bilinguals

“…Emotional working memory is defined as the ability to successfully deploy working memory in emotional contexts, and is measured by the standard working memory task with an inserted emotional background (Schweizer et al, 2013;Barker and Bialystok, 2019). When compared with the standard or traditional task with no emotional background, emotional working memory task calls for higher requirements on cognitive operation (Schweizer et al, 2013;Janus and Bialystok, 2018;Bai et al, 2019;Katie et al, 2019) and can help examine whether individuals can resist the interference of emotion and effectively operate information processing in an emotional and social environment (Janus and Bialystok, 2018). Moreover, it can be used to assess individuals on their emotion regulation abilities, and at the same time, to predict their problem-solving abilities and social adaptation competence in the real-life situations (Ladouceur et al, 2009;Schweizer et al, 2013;Engen and Anderson, 2018;Janus and Bialystok, 2018).…”

Children's memory of a story experienced with virtual reality versus traditional media technology

“…However, other views point out the possible negative impact of an immersive VR experience on children's learning. The emotional impairment hypothesis suggests that emotional content affects attention control and therefore the storage of information, making it hard to remember (Garrison & Schmeichel, 2018). Also, adding elements to a book story (e.g., textures, sounds) has been shown to sometimes interfere with learning (Tare et al, 2010).…”

Can negative emotion of task-irrelevant working memory representation affect its attentional capture? A study of eye movements

“…)。例如, 有研究者发现, 负性情绪刺激会影响 注意偏向, 能更快地吸引注意或占用更多的注意资 源, 表现出负性情绪偏向效应 (Nummenmaa et al, 2009;Pourtois et al, 2006), 在降低可见度的阈下知 觉条件 (Nasrallah et al, 2009) (Gupta et al, 2016;Padmala et al, 2018), 譬如, 高唤醒负性干扰刺激 (如肢解图片)在字母搜索任务 (Gupta et al, 2016;Okon-Singer et al, 2007)和定向辨别任务 (Erthal et al, 2005) (Erthal et al, 2005;Huang et al, 2013;Pessoa et al, 2002)。第三种是注意选择的负载理论(The Perceptual Load Theory) (Lavie, 1995(Lavie, , 2010 (Borg et al, 2011;Garrison & Schmeichel, 2019), 但较少有 研究考察已进入工作记忆系统中的负性情绪信息 是如何自上而下地影响视觉注意选择。存储在工作 记忆系统中的信息(即工作记忆表征)对视觉注意的 捕获近年来已得到大量研究的证实(见综述：Soto et al, 2008;潘毅, 2010;张豹, 黄赛, 2013), 被称 之为记忆驱动的注意捕获 (Olivers et al, 2006) (Kvavilashvili, 2014), 它是许多临床障碍群体, 如创伤后应激障 碍 (Catarino et al, 2015) 、 抑 郁 (Joormann et al, 2009)、沉思 (Fawcett et al, 2015)、焦虑 (Marzi et al, 2014…”