Gladwin Thomas Edward, Vink Matthijs
Department of Psychology and Counseling, University of Chichester, Chichester, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychiatry, Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, Utrecht University Medical Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Eur J Psychol. 2018 Jun 19;14(2):342-358. doi: 10.5964/ejop.v14i2.1473. eCollection 2018 Jun.
Emotionally salient stimuli have the ability to disrupt cognitive processing. This kind of disruption involves effects on working memory and may be related to mental health problems. To explore the nature of such emotional interference on working memory, a Virtual Attack Emotional Sternberg Task (VAEST) was used. Neutral faces were presented as distractors and warning signals, which were sometimes followed by a virtual attack, created by having the neutral face turn angry while the image was enlarged. The attack was hypothesized to have one of two effects: to disrupt cognitive processing and thereby increase interference effects, or to terminate a state of freezing and thereby reduce interference effects. The task was successfully completed online by a sample of 59 students. Results clearly show that the virtual attack caused a reduction of interference relative to no-attack trials. The apparent cognitive disruption caused by emotional distractors may thus reflect freezing, which can be reversed by a freeze-terminating stimulus.
情绪显著的刺激具有干扰认知加工的能力。这种干扰涉及对工作记忆的影响，并且可能与心理健康问题有关。为了探究这种情绪对工作记忆的干扰的本质，使用了虚拟攻击情绪斯特恩伯格任务（VAEST）。中性面孔作为干扰物和警告信号呈现，有时随后会出现虚拟攻击，即通过在图像放大时让中性面孔变得愤怒来创建。假设这种攻击有两种效果之一：干扰认知加工从而增加干扰效应，或者终止冻结状态从而减少干扰效应。59名学生的样本成功在线完成了该任务。结果清楚地表明，与无攻击试验相比，虚拟攻击导致干扰减少。因此，情绪干扰物引起的明显认知干扰可能反映了冻结状态，而这种状态可以通过终止冻结的刺激来逆转。
