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Reducing State Anxiety Using Working Memory Maintenance
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Frontal theta activity during working memory in test anxiety.

Zhan Shi1, Xin Gao, Renlai Zhou

  • 1aKey Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Science, Research Center for Learning Science, Ministry of Education, Southeast University bDepartment of Psychology, School of Social and Behavior Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing cFaculty of Modern Educational Technology, Northwest University for Nationalities, Lanzhou dState Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning eResearch Center of Emotion Regulation, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

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Test anxiety impairs working memory (WM) performance and reduces frontal-midline theta (FM-theta) activity. Highly anxious individuals showed poorer emotional working memory capacity and weaker FM-theta responses.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Psychophysiology

Background:

  • Working memory (WM) is linked to frontal-midline theta (FM-theta) activity.
  • Test anxiety is known to negatively impact WM performance.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the effect of test anxiety on FM-theta activity during WM tasks.
  • To explore the relationship between test anxiety, WM performance, and neural activity.

Main Methods:

  • Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to measure FM-theta activity in 37 undergraduates.
  • Participants completed a modified reading span task assessing neutral and emotional working memory capacity (WMC).

Main Results:

  • Highly test anxious participants demonstrated poorer emotional WMC compared to neutral WMC.
  • Weaker FM-theta activity was observed in highly test anxious participants during emotional WMC tasks.

Conclusions:

  • FM-theta activity serves as an indicator of both successful WM manipulation and efficient prefrontal cortex functioning.
  • Test anxiety impacts both cognitive performance and the underlying neural mechanisms of WM.