Schweizer Susanne, Dalgleish Tim
Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
Emotion. 2016 Feb;16(1):16-23. doi: 10.1037/emo0000072. Epub 2015 Sep 28.
Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) strongly predict variations in real-world cognitive functioning. However, little is known about how WMC is influenced by the ubiquitously present affective information in our everyday environments. Here, we present a series of 3 experiments investigating a novel WMC paradigm performed in affective (vs. neutral) contexts. The paradigm requires simultaneous performance of a visuospatial search and a verbal storage task. These tasks are performed in the presence of either neutral or negative emotional distractor images. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed our prediction that WMC would be reduced in the context of emotional compared with neutral distractors in student and community samples. Experiment 3 extended these findings to a clinical sample. WMC in motor vehicle accident survivors with a history of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was selectively reduced in the presence of trauma-related emotional distraction compared with survivors without a history of PTSD. Implications of these findings for affective cognitive science are discussed.
工作记忆容量(WMC)的个体差异有力地预测了现实世界认知功能的变化。然而,对于WMC如何受到我们日常环境中普遍存在的情感信息的影响,我们知之甚少。在此,我们展示了一系列3个实验,研究在情感(与中性相对)情境中执行的一种新型WMC范式。该范式要求同时执行视觉空间搜索和言语存储任务。这些任务在中性或负面情绪干扰图像的存在下进行。实验1和实验2证实了我们的预测,即在学生和社区样本中,与中性干扰物相比,在有情感干扰的情境下WMC会降低。实验3将这些发现扩展到了临床样本。与没有创伤后应激障碍(PTSD)病史的幸存者相比,有PTSD病史的机动车事故幸存者在存在与创伤相关的情感干扰时,其WMC会选择性降低。我们讨论了这些发现对情感认知科学的意义。