Department of Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters at Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo (FFCLRP-USP), Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.
Graduate Program in Cognitive Neuroscience and Behavior, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Paraiba, João Pessoa, Brazil.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 Jul;76(7):1696-1709. doi: 10.1177/17470218221125216. Epub 2022 Sep 26.
This study investigated the role of attentional resources in processing emotional faces in working memory (WM). Participants memorised two face arrays with the same emotion but different identities and were required to judge whether the test face had the same identity as one of the previous faces. Concurrently during encoding and maintenance, a sequence of high- or low-pitched tones (high load) or white noise bursts (low load) was presented, and participants were required to count how many low-tones were heard. Experiments 1 and 2 used an emotional and neutral test face, respectively. The results revealed a significant WM impairment for sad and angry faces in the high-load versus low-load condition but not for happy faces. In Experiment 1, participants remembered happy faces better than other emotional faces. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that performance was poorer for happy than sad faces but not for angry faces. This evidence suggests that depleting attentional resources has less impact on WM for happy faces than other emotional faces, but also that differential effects on WM for emotional faces depend on the presence or absence of emotion in the probe face at retrieval.
本研究探讨了注意力资源在工作记忆 (WM) 中处理情绪面孔的作用。参与者记忆了两个具有相同情绪但不同身份的面孔数组，并被要求判断测试面孔是否与之前的面孔之一具有相同的身份。在编码和维持期间，同时呈现一系列高音或低音调（高负载）或白噪声爆发（低负载），参与者被要求数听到的低音调次数。实验 1 和 2 分别使用了情绪和中性测试面孔。结果表明，在高负载与低负载条件下，悲伤和愤怒面孔的 WM 损伤显著，但快乐面孔则没有。在实验 1 中，参与者记住快乐的面孔比其他情绪面孔更好。相比之下，实验 2 表明，与悲伤面孔相比，快乐面孔的表现较差，但与愤怒面孔相比则没有。这一证据表明，与其他情绪面孔相比，耗尽注意力资源对快乐面孔的 WM 影响较小，但也表明情绪面孔对 WM 的不同影响取决于检索时探测面孔中是否存在情绪。
