Writing about a stressful experience can impair visual working memory.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Acute stress is known to negatively impact working memory.
• The specific effects of writing about unresolved stressors on working memory processes remain underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how writing about an unresolved stressful experience affects working memory performance and underlying cognitive processes.
• To compare the impact of stressful writing versus neutral writing on working memory.

Main Methods:

• 282 participants were randomly assigned to either a stressful writing condition or a control condition (writing about the previous day).
• Performance was assessed using a change detection task.
• Computational modeling was employed to estimate attention, capacity, and guessing bias.

Main Results:

• Writing about a stressful experience significantly impaired performance on the change detection task compared to the control group.
• Task attention was significantly impaired in the stressful writing condition.
• Computational modeling revealed deficits in attention as the primary mechanism of impairment.

Conclusions:

• Writing about an unresolved stressor can negatively impact working memory, specifically attention.
• These findings suggest that expressive writing about stressors can elicit cognitive effects similar to acute stress.
• The results do not align with predictions from mood-as-information theory regarding the effects of writing on cognitive function.