The impact of affective information on working memory: A pair of meta-analytic reviews of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence

Abstract

Everyday life is defined by goal states that are continuously reprioritized based on available, often affective information. To pursue these goals, individuals need to process and maintain goal-relevant information, while ignoring potentially salient information that distracts resources from these goals. Empirically, this ability has typically been operationalized as working memory (WM) capacity. Interestingly, however, until recently there have been few concerted research efforts to investigate the impact of information’s affective salience on WM capacity. In the present review we address this question by exploring the potential differential impact of affective compared to neutral information on WM, and the underlying neural substrates. One hundred and sixty-five individual studies were included in the meta-analysis (N = 7433). Results showed negligible to small (d ̂ = –.07 – .20) effects of affective information on behavioral measures of WM in healthy individuals (n = 4936) that varied as a function of valence and task-relevance. For all behavioral results heterogeneity analyses were significant, demonstrating the need to identify further task-specific factors and individual differences that moderate affective WM. At the neural level (33 studies; n = 683), processing affective versus neutral material during WM tasks was associated with more frequent recruitment of the vlPFC, the amygdala and the temporo-occipital cortex. In contrast to healthy individuals, across behavioral studies those suffering from mental health problems (n = 2041) showed an impairment of WM accuracy (d ̂ = –0.21) in the presence of affective material. These findings highlight the importance of integrating behavioral and neural levels of analysis. Finally, these findings suggest that affective WM capacity may be a transdiagnostic mechanism associated with poor mental health.

Positivity Effect and Working Memory Performance Remains Intact in Older Adults After Sleep Deprivation

“…This effect remained intact after sleep deprivation. Overall, the findings of a positivity effect in older adults corroborates a bulk of evidence showing an age-related positivity effect in attention (Mather and Carstensen, 2003), memory (Carstensen and Mikels, 2005;Reed et al, 2014) and working memory (Mammarella et al, 2013;Schweizer et al, 2018;Truong and Yang, 2014). Given that sleep deprivation leads to a mild upregulation of autonomic and neuroendocrine stress systems (Meerlo et al, 2008; our results are at odds with those of Everaerd and colleagues (2017).…”

“…Even when the positivity effect was not evident in direct measures of accuracy and reaction times, using diffusion modelling, Spaniol and colleagues (2008) could tie the positivity effect to mnemonic processes rather than a response bias towards positive stimuli. Moreover, a recent meta-analysis synthesized the age-related positivity effect on working memory and concluded that there is a relatively stable though small effect on accuracy, but a somewhat stronger effect for reaction times (Schweizer et al, 2018). Taken together, although the positivity effect is well established there is so far limited research on every day activities that could affect the positivity effect in older adults.…”

Affective enhancement of working memory is maintained in depression.

“…Preliminary evidence to support this hypothesis stems from Schweizer and Dalgleish (2016) who showed that simultaneously performing a visuospatial search task (operation task) and a verbal storage task (remembering words) in the context of either neutral or negative task-irrelevant background images impaired WMC in both healthy and clinical (i.e., lifetime history of PTSD) samples reliably. In line with Schweizer and Dalgleish (2016) , a recent meta-analysis investigating the effects of affective material on WM showed that negative distractors, in particular, had an impairing effect on WM performance ( Schweizer et al, 2016 ).…”

“…The framework further suggests that stimuli high in affective significance hijack executive control resources thereby impairing performance on concurrent executive tasks. A recent meta-analysis has generated broad support for these predictions ( Schweizer et al, 2016 ).…”

Positivity Effect and Working Memory Performance Remains Intact in Older Adults After Sleep Deprivation

“…Even when the positivity effect was not evident in direct measures of accuracy and reaction times, using diffusion modeling, Spaniol et al (2008) could tie the positivity effect to mnemonic processes rather than a response bias toward positive stimuli. Moreover, a recent meta-analysis synthesized the age-related positivity effect on working memory and concluded that there is a relatively stable though small effect on accuracy, but a somewhat stronger effect for reaction times (Schweizer et al, 2018). Taken together, although the positivity effect is well established there is so far limited research on every day activities that could affect the positivity effect in older adults.…”