Negative emotion boosts quality of visual working memory representation

Negative emotion impacts a variety of cognitive processes, including working memory (WM). The present study investigated whether negative emotion modulated WM capacity (quantity) or resolution (quality), 2 independent limits on WM storage. In Experiment 1, observers tried to remember several colors...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inEmotion (Washington, D.C.) Vol. 16; no. 5; p. 760
Main Authors Xie, Weizhen, Zhang, Weiwei
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.08.2016
Subjects
Adult
Color Perception - physiology
Emotions - physiology
Female
Humans
Male
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
Mental Recall - physiology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Young Adult
Online AccessGet more information

Cover

More Information
Summary:Negative emotion impacts a variety of cognitive processes, including working memory (WM). The present study investigated whether negative emotion modulated WM capacity (quantity) or resolution (quality), 2 independent limits on WM storage. In Experiment 1, observers tried to remember several colors over 1-s delay and then recalled the color of a randomly picked memory item by clicking a best-matching color on a continuous color wheel. On each trial, before the visual WM task, 1 of 3 emotion conditions (negative, neutral, or positive) was induced by having observers to rate the valence of an International Affective Picture System image. Visual WM under negative emotion showed enhanced resolution compared with neutral and positive conditions, whereas the number of retained representations was comparable across the 3 emotion conditions. These effects were generalized to closed-contour shapes in Experiment 2. To isolate the locus of these effects, Experiment 3 adopted an iconic memory version of the color recall task by eliminating the 1-s retention interval. No significant change in the quantity or quality of iconic memory was observed, suggesting that the resolution effects in the first 2 experiments were critically dependent on the need to retain memory representations over a short period of time. Taken together, these results suggest that negative emotion selectively boosts visual WM quality, supporting the dissociable nature quantitative and qualitative aspects of visual WM representation. (PsycINFO Database Record
ISSN:1931-1516
DOI:10.1037/emo0000159