title: Affective bias in visual working memory is associated with capacity.
abstract: How does the affective nature of task stimuli modulate working memory (WM)? This study investigates whether WM maintains emotional information in a biased manner to meet the motivational principle of approaching positivity and avoiding negativity by retaining more approach-related positive content over avoidance-related negative content. This bias may exist regardless of individual differences in WM functionality, as indexed by WM capacity (overall bias hypothesis). Alternatively, this bias may be contingent on WM capacity (capacity-based hypothesis), in which a better WM system may be more likely to reveal an adaptive bias. In two experiments, participants performed change localisation tasks with emotional and non-emotional stimuli to estimate the number of items that they could retain for each of those stimuli. Although participants did not seem to remember one type of emotional content (e.g. happy faces) better than the other type of emotional content (e.g. sad faces), there was a significant correlation between WM capacity and affective bias. Specifically, participants with higher WM capacity for non-emotional stimuli (colours or line-drawing symbols) tended to maintain more happy faces over sad faces. These findings demonstrated the presence of a "built-in" affective bias in WM as a function of its systematic limitations, favouring the capacity-based hypothesis.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of California , Riverside , CA , USA.|b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Weizhen
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-4655-6496
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.|c Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Huanhuan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Xiangyu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ying
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Shiyou
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.|d Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences , Boston University , Boston , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Rong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.|e Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Key Laboratory of Mental Health , Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Yingmin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zou
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , Renmin University of China , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Yanyan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cui
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D015982:Bias; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Emotion; affective bias; capacity; working memory