The effects of affect: Working memory, rumination and emotion reactivity - Insights from an affective n-back task

Internalizing disorders are associated with emotion regulation characterized by repetitive negative thinking. There is a proposed relationship between rumination and working memory and there are gaps in understanding how emotions impact this association. In the present study, we investigated differences in negative (hot) and neutral (cold) working memory processing in relation to measures of rumination and emotion reactivity. Our aim was to address hot working memory as a potential clinically relevant mechanism in challenges with emotion regulation. Emotion reactivity was hypothesized to mediate the relationship between rumination and working memory.

Participants were undergraduate students (N = 120). Working memory was assessed using the Memory Affective Flexibility Task (MAFT), an affective experimental paradigm based on the n-back task that incorporates neutral and valenced visual stimuli. Facets of maladaptive emotion regulation were measured through self-report questionnaires for rumination and emotion reactivity. Associations were examined using multiple linear regression with rumination as the outcome variable.

There were small relationships between working memory performance in both neutral and negative conditions of the MAFT with measures of rumination and emotion reactivity. There was a significant moderate correlation between emotion reactivity and rumination.

Despite correlations among self-report measures of emotion reactivity and rumination, we observed limited support for the links of task-based hot or cold working memory performance with self-rated emotion measures. This aligns with previous reports of modest correlations between task-based and self-report measures. The findings add to a growing literature on the challenges of capturing the interplay between emotion processes, affect and cognition in neuroscientific research.