Electric Shock Threat Induced Anxiety Affect Object Working Memory

Emotional and cognitive are two hot issues in psychology, the relationship between the two also attracted the attention of many researchers. Negative emotions play an important role in human evolution. As a double-edged sword, however, it affected humans’ cognitive activities seriously. Processing efficiency theory suggests that effects of negative emotion on cognitive performance may be mediated by effect on working memory, which led researchers’ in-depth exploration of negative emotions and working memory.About the relationship between the two, previous studies tend to pay more attention to spatial working memory and verbal working memory. They found that negative emotions have a selective effect on spatial working memory, but has no effect on verbal working memory. According to Baddeley’s working memory model, object (visual) working memory and spatial working memory both belong to the visual-spatial sketchpad, then we speculated that both storage mechanism and processing mechanisms should be similar. More and more researchers found that object working memory and spatial working memory are separated, and therefore to explore the relationship between negative emotions and the object of working memory is even more necessary. So we propose a bold hypothesis that negative emotions (anxiety) will affect object working memory, and conducted three behavioral experiments to explore the mechanism of this effect.Experiment1used threat-evoked anxiety to induce the participants’anxiety, and then ask them to do the n-back task in order to see whether anxiety has an impact on object working memory. The stimulus will be divided into two categories; one has a changing background while the other not. The analysis of the results showed something interesting:there is no significant difference in the shock group and the non-shock group comparison no matter the judgment for a single dimension, or a combination of multi-dimensional characteristics of the object information. This is not in line with our previous experimental assumptions. In addition, in the analysis of the results is also found, the design of the experiment1there are some shortcomings, this may also be one of the reasons that lead to a insignificant result. So in Experiment2experimental improved to change motivational factors brought about by improper guidance language, reduce the number of the Block to continue to examine the test object working memory performance. Experimental assumed that anxiety will cause a decline of objects and object characteristics on the correct rate. The results found that:Experiment2results in a certain degree of validation prior assumptions, anxiety object working memory has an impact, but also found that this effect is mainly through the shape memory object information work, but this effect is only in correct rate performance, but did not show differences in the reaction. We speculate that the coding method may affect the results. In order to further verify this selective impact, while the coding manner guessing confirmed, experiment3joined the articulatory suppression, to prevent speech coding of the color. We assumed this will lead to the main effects of the emotional type, all the correct rate of them will be influenced by the anxiety. Our assumptions were approved to be right. This conclusion is in memory tasks of the Experiment3, the memory of the color may be through speech naming to achieve, at least in a certain degree by the impact of the speech coding. Shape information is not the speech coding advantage, so the correct rate of decline was in shape information memory. Object information due to a combination of color and shape information, so without articulatory suppression it can rely on the color information of a certain code.Visible spatial working memory and object working memory belong to the very same system; they differ from each other but still closely linked. Both of them will affect by the negative emotions. However, the impact of negative emotions on object working memory is not comprehensive, but selective. This effect appears suppressed Uploaded pronunciation larger effect, whether it is the shape feature group, color feature group or the binding group, the correct rate will appear a significant decline.