When Threat Comes from Within: First Evidence that Anticipatory Emotion Impairs Working Memory

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Emotion Research

Background:

• Anticipating threat captures attentional resources.
• Working memory (WM) is crucial for daily cognitive tasks.
• The impact of threat anticipation on WM is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if anticipating threat impairs WM performance.
• To examine if anxiety modulates the effects of threat anticipation on WM.
• To explore the relationship between attentional capture and WM under threat anticipation.

Main Methods:

• Participants engaged in a gamified complex-span task with potential threat cues.
• Threat anticipation conditions (proximal, distal) and a neutral condition were used.
• Attentional capture was measured by parity-judgment accuracy; WM was assessed via serial recall.

Main Results:

• Threat anticipation led to attentional capture and impaired WM across both experiments.
• Attentional capture decreased with anxiety in Experiment 1 but not Experiment 2.
• WM impairment increased with cognitive anxiety, particularly under distal threat anticipation.

Conclusions:

• Anticipating threat demonstrably impairs working memory.
• Anxiety exacerbates WM deficits during threat anticipation, especially under higher cognitive load.
• Findings support models linking emotion, anxiety, and cognitive functions like WM.