Effects Of Trait Anxiety On Attentional Control Performance:the Working Memory Capacity As A Moderator

There is a certain level of physical and psychological anxiety in life when we are in danger or stimulated,and this is something we all experienced.Attention control theory focuses on the cognitive processing of individuals with different levels of anxiety,and focuses on the more stable aspects of trait anxiety,taking into account the effects of state anxiety also.There have been enough studies to show that chronic or state anxiety can have negative effects on many tasks.Working memory capacity refers to the amount of information that an individual keeps while processing information,which can reflect the storage capacity,processing efficiency and control attention.Attention control theory holds that working memory capacity is an important regulatory factor in the process of the negative effects of anxiety on attention,and that individuals with high working memory capacity have more psychological resources,which can improve their ability to restrain distraction stimulation.Therefore,this study also investigated whether working memory capacity had a regulatory effect on the attention shifting function of college students with different levels of trait anxiety.Study 1: attention control theory holds that anxiety can increase the attention bias of threatening stimulus,reduce the attention resource allocation of current task,and impair the attention control function of central executive system.Note the assumption in the control theory that anxiety can impair the processing efficiency of tasks involving the shifting function.Therefore,this experiment uses task transformation paradigm to verify whether college students with different trait anxiety levels have significant differences in attention control shifting function.The results confirm the hypothesis of attention control theory that trait anxiety affects the shifting function of attention control central executive system,and has a more negative effect on processing efficiency than on operating performance.Study 2: working memory capacity refers to the amount of information that an individual keeps while processing information,which can reflect the storage capacity,processing efficiency and control attention.Attention control theory holds that working memory capacity is an important regulatory factor in the process of the negative effects of anxiety on attention,and that individuals with high working memory capacity have more psychological resources,which can improve their ability to restrain distraction stimulation.So we used the Corsi Block test to investigate whether the working memory capacity had a moderating effect on the attention transfer function of college students with different trait anxiety levels.The results showed that working memory capacity did have an moderating effect.In particular,there were significant differences in the performance of high anxiety individuals with different working memory capacity during the process of anxiety affecting the shifiting function of attention control system.Conclusion: Trait anxiety has negative effect on the shifting function of central executive system.Trait anxiety reduces the processing efficiency of shifting function.Working memory capacity plays an important role in the process of anxiety affecting the shifting function.Thus,the hypothesis of attention control theory is validated.