Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh Schoolof Medicine, 3811 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Emotion. 2009 Dec;9(6):855-64. doi: 10.1037/a0017747.
This study examined the effects of trait anxiety and age on performance of an emotional working memory task designed to investigate attentional control processes in the context of emotion. Participants included children, adolescents, and adults (8-30 years old). They performed the Emotional Face N-Back (EFNBACK) task, a modified n-back working memory task with four emotional distracter types (no picture, neutral, fearful, and happy) and two memory-load conditions (0-back and 2-back), and completed self-report trait anxiety measures. Results indicated that participants high in trait anxiety had slower reaction times on the fearful 2-back memory-load condition. A significant interaction with age indicated that this effect was greater in the younger participants. These findings suggest that anxious individuals, particularly younger ones, exhibit difficulty resisting interference from threat-related stimuli when greater attentional resources are being recruited.
本研究考察了特质焦虑和年龄对情绪工作记忆任务表现的影响，该任务旨在研究情绪背景下的注意控制过程。参与者包括儿童、青少年和成年人（8-30 岁）。他们完成了情绪面孔 N-回（EFNBACK）任务，这是一种带有四种情绪干扰类型（无图片、中性、恐惧和快乐）和两种记忆负荷条件（0 回和 2 回）的改良 n 回工作记忆任务，并完成了特质焦虑自评量表。结果表明，特质焦虑水平高的参与者在恐惧的 2 回记忆负荷条件下反应时间较慢。与年龄的显著交互作用表明，这种效应在年轻参与者中更为明显。这些发现表明，焦虑个体，尤其是年轻个体，在需要更多注意力资源时，表现出难以抵制与威胁相关刺激的干扰。
