Childhood anxiety and memory functioning: a comparison of systemic and processing accounts

Information-processing models of childhood anxiety highlight the centrality of memory processes in the maintenance and intensification of anxiety. Recent advances in memory research allow for an increasingly fine-grained analysis of the relation between anxiety and memory. The relation between childhood anxiety and memory was examined in a sample of 160 high- and low-trait-anxious sixth through eighth grade children. Results indicated that anxiety predicted a memory bias toward negative relative to neutral information during conceptual but not perceptual tasks. Further, anxiety predicted a memory bias toward positive relative to neutral information on procedural tasks and a memory bias away from positive relative to neutral information on declarative tasks. These findings accent the complexity and multidimensionality of relations among childhood anxiety, the emotional valence of stimuli, types of cognitive processing, and memory systems in contributing to biases in children's memory functioning.