Premium
Running with emotion: When affective content hampers working memory performance
Author(s) -
Fairfield Beth,
Mammarella Nicola,
Di Domenico Alberto,
Palumbo Rocco
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
international journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1464-066X
pISSN - 0020-7594
DOI - 10.1002/ijop.12101
Subject(s) - psychology , recall , valence (chemistry) , cognitive psychology , working memory , task (project management) , content (measure theory) , context (archaeology) , emotional valence , social psychology , cognition , neuroscience , mathematical analysis , paleontology , physics , mathematics , management , quantum mechanics , economics , biology
This study tested the hypothesis that affective content may undermine rather than facilitate working memory (WM) performance. To this end, participants performed a running WM task with positive, negative and neutral words. In typical running memory tasks, participants are presented with lists of unpredictable length and are asked to recall the last three or four items. We found that accuracy with affective words decreased as lists lengthened, whereas list length did not influence recall of neutral words. We interpreted this pattern of results in terms of a limited resource model of WM in which valence represents additional information that needs to be manipulated, especially in the context of difficult trials.