The Effects Of Childhood Maltreatment On Working Memory By Different Emotions

Purpose: To investigate the effects of different emotional states on working memory of individuals with a history of childhood psychological abuse.Methods :(1)Taking 2100 college students in a university as the subjects of the investigation,they were recruited to participate the childhood psychological abuse questionnaire.(2)The subjects were selected by the detection criteria of the questionnaire.After removing invalid data,there are 59 subjects in the psychological abuse group and 72 subjects in the non-psychological abuse group.In the psychological abuse group,29 subjects were induced by positive emotion and 30 subjects were induced by negative emotion.In the non-psychological abuse group,34 subjects were induced by positive emotion and 38 subjects were induced by negative emotion.(3)Experiment 1: used2(group: psychological abuse group vs non-psychological abuse group)×2(emotional value: positive emotion vs negative emotion)between-subject factorial design investigate the effects of different emotional states on verbal working memory of individuals with a history of childhood psychological abuse.(4)Experiment 2: used2(group: psychological abuse group vs non-psychological abuse group)×2(emotional value: positive emotion vs negative emotion)between-subject factorial design to investigate the effects of different emotional states on spatial working memory of individuals with a history of childhood psychological abuse.Results:(1)In experiment one,the subjects' reaction time was taken as the dependent variable index,and the results of one-way variance analysis showed that the main effect of the group was not significant(F=1.236,p>0.05),the interaction between group and emotional value was not significant(F=1.441,p>0.05),the main effect of emotional value was significant(F=4.454,p<0.05),the reaction time of subjects induced by negative emotion was significantly longer than the reaction time of subjects induced by positive emotion.(2)In experiment two,the subjects' reaction time was taken as the dependent variable index,and the results of one-way variance analysis showed that the main effect of the group was not significant(F=2.416,p>0.05),the main effect of the emotional value was significant(F=4.990,p<0.05),the reaction time of subjects induced by negative emotionwas significantly longer than the reaction time of subjects induced by positive emotion.The interaction between group and emotional value was significant(F=4.657,p<0.05).Further analysis of simple effects showed that,the reaction time induced by negative emotion were significantly longer than the reaction time induced by positive emotions in the psychological abuse group,while there was no significant effect between the reaction time induced by two different emotions in the control group.Conclusions:Negative emotion can damage the verbal working memory and the spatial working memory of individuals.Compare to the normal individuals,negative emotion had a greater injury on spatial working memory of individuals with a history of childhood psychological abuse.