title: The impact of affective contexts on working memory capacity in healthy populations and in individuals with PTSD.
abstract: Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) strongly predict variations in real-world cognitive functioning. However, little is known about how WMC is influenced by the ubiquitously present affective information in our everyday environments. Here, we present a series of 3 experiments investigating a novel WMC paradigm performed in affective (vs. neutral) contexts. The paradigm requires simultaneous performance of a visuospatial search and a verbal storage task. These tasks are performed in the presence of either neutral or negative emotional distractor images. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed our prediction that WMC would be reduced in the context of emotional compared with neutral distractors in student and community samples. Experiment 3 extended these findings to a clinical sample. WMC in motor vehicle accident survivors with a history of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was selectively reduced in the presence of trauma-related emotional distraction compared with survivors without a history of PTSD. Implications of these findings for affective cognitive science are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
authors.forename: Susanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schweizer
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dalgleish
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000523:psychology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D064368:Healthy Volunteers / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology*; D017741:Survivors / Q000523:psychology