JOM KITA KE POLITEKNIK

The Impact of Affective Contexts on Working Memory Capacity in Healthy Populations and in Individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Schweizer, Susanne

The Impact of Affective Contexts on Working Memory Capacity in Healthy Populations and in Individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - 2016-02-01.

/pmc/articles/PMC7614023/ /pubmed/26414191

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) strongly predict variations in real-world cognitive functioning. However, little is known about how WMC is influenced by the ubiquitously present affective information in our everyday environments. Here, we present a series of 3 experiments investigating a novel WMC paradigm performed in affective (versus neutral) contexts. The paradigm requires simultaneous performance of a visuospatial search and a verbal storage task. These tasks are performed in the presence of either neutral or negative emotional distractor images. Experiments 1 & 2 confirmed our prediction that WMC would be reduced in the context of emotional compared to neutral distractors in student and community samples. Experiment 3 extended these findings to a clinical sample. WMC in motor vehicle accident survivors with a history of PTSD was selectively reduced in the presence of trauma-related emotional distraction compared to survivors without a history of PTSD. Implications of these findings for affective cognitive science are discussed.





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