An unpleasant emotional state reduces working memory capacity: electrophysiological evidence.
An unpleasant emotional state reduces working memory capacity: electrophysiological evidence.
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DOI：
10.1093/scan/nsx030
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发表时间：
2017-06-01
影响因子：
4.2
通讯作者：
David IA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Figueira JSB;Oliveira L;Pereira MG;Pacheco LB;Lobo I;Motta-Ribeiro GC;David IA
情绪状态可以通过影响工作记忆等认知过程来指导我们在日常生活中做出的行动和决定。我们从电生理学的角度研究了不愉快的情绪状态对目标相关工作记忆表征的长期干扰。参与者在完成一项变化检测任务之前，会以一种遮挡的方式呈现令人不快的或与任务无关的图片。我们重点研究了对侧延迟活动(CDA)，这是一种事件相关电位，对工作记忆中存储的任务相关项目的数量很敏感。我们发现，在不愉快的情绪状态下，CDA波幅的渐近极限比在中性情绪状态下要低，即情绪状态能够减少被试在工作记忆中所能持有的任务相关项目的数量。此外，经历过更多侵入性想法的人和那些性格焦虑的人都更容易受到情绪状态的影响。我们提供的证据表明，不愉快的情绪状态降低了与任务相关的项目的视觉工作记忆，特别是在易受影响的个体中。这些结果开辟了新的途径来揭示情绪-认知加工，这是不适应的WM表征的基础，以及这种加工在精神疾病发展中的作用。
Emotional states can guide the actions and decisions we make in our everyday life through their influence on cognitive processes such as working memory (WM). We investigated the long-lasting interference that an unpleasant emotional state had on goal-relevant WM representations from an electrophysiological perspective. Participants performed a change detection task that was preceded by the presentation of unpleasant or neutral task-irrelevant pictures in a blocked fashion. We focused on the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential that is sensitive to the number of task-relevant items stored in WM. We found that the asymptotic limit for the CDA amplitude was lower during the unpleasant emotional state than during the neutral one; that is, an emotional state was capable of reducing how many task-relevant items the participants could hold in WM. Furthermore, both the individuals who experienced more intrusive thoughts and those who were dispositionally anxious were more susceptible to the influence of the emotional state. We provide evidence that an unpleasant emotional state diminished visual WM for task-relevant items, particularly in susceptible individuals. These results open new avenues to uncover the emotional-cognitive processing that underlies maladaptive WM representations and the role of such processing in the development of mental illness.