Defining Affective Working Memory

Some recent studies of working memory have led to the proposal of a new WM maintenance component specialized for maintaining emotions. The crux of the evidence for affective WM is the finding of differential selective interference effects on the maintenance of negative emotions compared to the maintenance of visuospatial information (Mikels & Reuter-Lorenz, in press). This study sought to replicate and extend the selective interference effects shown previously by examining the effects on positive emotion maintenance, in order to further elucidate the defining characteristics of affective WM. It is hypothesized that affective WM consists of a single affective-arousal maintenance component, as opposed to valence-specific maintenance sub-components. Also, it is hypothesized that emotions are subject to automatic reappraisal processes during rehearsal, which modify the emotional intensity from its originally elicited state. Consistent with the hypothesis, the present results indicate that the affective WM maintenance component is a single buffer. Both negative and positive emotion maintenance were similarly impaired by concurrent negative and positive emotion-regulation tasks, as compared to maintenance task-only performance. Furthermore, a concurrent cognitive task facilitated positive and negative emotion maintenance, indicating that automatic reappraisal processes were prevented from occurring when cognitive resources were already consumed.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• DeFraine, William

• emotion

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/14747

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/14747