Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Emotion. 2012 Jun;12(3):605-17. doi: 10.1037/a0024436. Epub 2011 Jul 25.
Across days, individuals experience varying levels of negative affect, control of attention, and motivation. We investigated whether this intraindividual variability was coupled with daily fluctuations in working memory (WM) performance. In 100 days, 101 younger individuals worked on a spatial N-back task and rated negative affect, control of attention, and motivation. Results showed that individuals differed in how reliably WM performance fluctuated across days, and that subjective experiences were primarily linked to performance accuracy. WM performance was lower on days with higher levels of negative affect, reduced control of attention, and reduced task-related motivation. Thus, variables that were found to predict WM in between-subjects designs showed important relationships to WM at the within-person level. In addition, there was shared predictive variance among predictors of WM. Days with increased negative affect and reduced performance were also days with reduced control of attention and reduced motivation to work on tasks. These findings are in line with proposed mechanisms linking negative affect and cognitive performance.
个体在不同的日子里会经历不同程度的负面情绪、注意力控制和动机。我们研究了这种个体内部的可变性是否与日常工作记忆（WM）表现的波动有关。在 100 天里，101 名年轻个体完成了空间 N-回任务，并对负面情绪、注意力控制和动机进行了评分。结果表明，个体在 WM 表现的波动上存在可靠性差异，主观体验主要与表现准确性相关。WM 表现较低的日子伴随着更高水平的负面情绪、注意力控制降低和与任务相关的动机降低。因此，在被试间设计中预测 WM 的变量在个体内水平上与 WM 存在重要关系。此外，WM 预测因子之间存在共享的预测方差。负面情绪增加和表现下降的日子也是注意力控制下降和完成任务的动机降低的日子。这些发现与将负面情绪和认知表现联系起来的提出的机制一致。
