title: Trait anxiety and impaired control of reflective attention in working memory.
abstract: The present study investigated whether the control of reflective attention in working memory (WM) is impaired in high trait anxiety individuals. We focused on the consequences of refreshing-a simple reflective process of thinking briefly about a just-activated representation in mind-on the subsequent processing of verbal stimuli. Participants performed a selective refreshing task, in which they initially refreshed or read one word from a three-word set, and then refreshed a non-selected item from the initial phrase or read aloud a new word. High trait anxiety individuals exhibited greater latencies when refreshing a word after experiencing the refreshing of a word from the same list of semantic associates. The same pattern was observed for reading a new word after prior refreshing. These findings suggest that high trait anxiety individuals have difficulty resolving interference from active distractors when directing reflective attention towards contents in WM or processing a visually presented word.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Neuropsychology, Graduate School of Medicine and Pharmaceutical Sciences , University of Toyama , Toyama , Japan.
authors.forename: Takatoshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hoshino
authors.affiliation: b Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , University of Tokyo , Tokyo , Japan.
authors.forename: Yoshihiko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tanno
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001007:Anxiety; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Interference resolution; Reflection; Trait anxiety; Working memory