Getting over it: Working memory capacity and affective responses to stressful events in daily life.

Abstract

Working memory capacity (WMC) refers to the capacity to maintain information in short-term storage while processing other information. WMC has been related to higher-order cognitive functions like language comprehension and goal maintenance, and a growing body of research implicates WMC in emotion processes as well. The current research tested the preregistered hypothesis that individual differences in WMC relate to affective states following daily stressors. We measured WMC in 92 participants using both neutral and emotional WMC tasks and assessed momentary affect, the occurrence of stressful events, and responses to those events using brief experience sampling surveys 5 times per day across 6 days. Results revealed that more stressful events related to higher momentary negative affect, but less so among participants higher in WMC. This result is consistent with the view that WMC plays a role in emotion regulation. Exploratory analyses yielded suggestive clues as to why individuals higher in WMC may experience reduced negative affect following daily stressors.

Attention Control Measures Improve the Prediction of Performance in Navy Trainees

“…Empirically, individual differences in attention control explain considerable variance in academic achievement (Ahmed et al, 2019;Blankenship et al, 2019;McVay and Kane, 2012), job performance (Nelson, 2003;Guo et al, 2020;Bosco et al, 2015), emotion regulation (Engen & Anderson, 2018;Garrison & Schmeichel, 2020;Moran, 2016), rationality , sensory discrimination ability (Tsukahara et al, 2020), and complex problem solving (Dempster, 1991;Draheim et al, 2021;Martin et al, 2020;Salthouse et al, 2003). For a review of the expansive role of attention control on complex behavior, see Draheim et al (2022).…”

Ultra-brief Ambulatory Assessment of Working Memory Capacity via Smart Phones

“…Applied research over the past 30 years has demonstrated that individual differences in WMC are strongly associated with important domains of higher-order cognition, development, and behavior including fluid intelligence/reasoning ability (Conway et al, 2003;Kyllonen & Christal, 1990), control of attention/cognitive control (Engle, 2010;Redick, 2013), mind wandering (McVay & Kane, 2009;Unsworth et al, 2012), and everyday skills such as driving (Wood, Hartley, Furley, & Wilson, 2016). Recent work has also focused attention on the possibility that WMC may index an individual's capacity to carry out goal-directed behavior, modifying how individuals respond in the presence of an environmental/contextual challenge (Hofmann, Gschwendner, Friese, Wiers, & Schmitt, 2008;Hofmann, Schmeichel, & Baddeley, 2012;Garrison & Schmeichel, 2020).…”

“…behave more consistently with stated behavioral standards; Hofmann, Friese, & Roefs, 2009;Hofmann, Friese, & Wiers, 2011). In addition, studies linking lab-based assessment of WMC with EMA of stress-related processes indicate that individual differences in WMC may predict negative affective responses to stressor exposures over the course of daily life (Garrison & Schmeichel, 2020). Critically, these examples of work connecting WMC to complex behavioral processes are based on single lab-based assessments of WMC, which has limited examination of the role of WMC in these processes to the level of inter-individual differences.…”

Reliability and validity of the Brief Emotional Experience Scale (BEES) for mood monitoring

“…For example, Eckenrode (1984) recorded participant mood and the presence/absence of negative event/s for 28 consecutive days, and as expected participants reporting more frequent negative events tended to be those with lower mood. More recent investigations have evaluated how various factors can influence mood changes in response to life events, such as personality factors (Leger et al, 2016;Polk et al, 2020;Yang, 2020), genetic factors (Sicorello et al, 2020), perceived neighbourhood characteristics (Scott et al, 2018), working memory capacity (Garrison & Schmeichel, 2020;Pe et al, 2015), cognitive appraisals (Brose et al, 2020;Fosco & Lydon-Staley, 2019;Gunaydin et al, 2016;Panaite et al, 2019), attentional bias (Iijima et al, 2018), having a sense of purpose (Hill et al, 2018), having a sense of control (Koffer et al, 2019), humour (Nezlek et al, 2020), physical activity (Puterman et al, 2017), sexual activity (Kashdan et al, 2018), social behaviour (Schacter & Margolin, 2018), cognitive-behavioural therapy intervention (McIntyre et al, 2019), and various coping strategies (Finkelstein-Fox et al, 2019;Santiago et al, 2016;Shermeyer et al, 2018). For example, Koffer et al (2019) obtained daily reports from 150 adults over 9 weeks and found that individuals with a higher sense of personal control typically were less reactive to negative daily events.…”