EEG evidences of emotional working memory deficits in test anxiety individuals across cognitive load conditions

Test anxiety impairs attentional control and negatively affects working memory (WM). According to Attentional Control Theory (ACT), individuals with high test anxiety (HTA) exhibit impaired attentional control compared to those with low test anxiety (LTA), with these deficits becoming more pronounced in high cognitive load and test-related threat conditions. This study used the Test Anxiety Scale (TAS) to group participants and combined the Sternberg WM task with EEG to investigate emotional WM processing differences between HTA (n = 43) and LTA (n = 45) individuals in high and low cognitive loads, with exposure to neutral and test-related threat stimuli. During the high-load WM encoding phase, HTA individuals showed enhanced theta power compared to LTA individuals specifically under neutral stimuli, while LTA individuals exhibited increased theta power for threat versus neutral stimuli-a pattern absent in HTA individuals. No significant theta differences emerged during maintenance. Alpha power did not differ between groups during encoding, but HTA individuals demonstrated significantly elevated alpha power than LTA individuals during the maintenance phase. These findings indicate that HTA individuals exhibit WM deficits. While they demonstrate flexible allocation of attentional resources for neutral stimuli under high-load encoding condition, their theta modulation capacity fails to show significant enhancement when processing test-related threat stimuli compared to neutral stimuli, reflecting a compromised ability to meet elevated cognitive demands. Moreover, during the maintenance phase, HTA individuals require greater attentional control resources than LTA individuals to suppress irrelevant information.