A study published in Psychophysiology found that subjects who took part in cognitive training to improve working memory showed increased anxiety during a subsequent memory task, compared to the group who did not partake in any training.
Anxiety disorders have been linked to impaired working memory, leading some researchers to suggest that improving working memory can alleviate anxiety. Findings on the subject, however, have been inconsistent.
Study authors Christian Grillon and colleagues propose that improving working memory function might actually increase anxiety. They point to one cognitive theory that describes a “competition for resources” between emotion and cognition. According to this theory, anxiety impairs cognitive functioning by “diverting limited cognitive resources away from a task and toward threatening stimuli.” Improving working memory function might, therefore, free up resources that can be used for threat processing, leading to increased anxiety.
“Understanding how working memory affects anxiety is the first step toward developing improved cognitive treatments,” the authors say.
A study was conducted with a sample of 40 adults who were assigned to one of two conditions. Twenty participants took part in a working memory training session, while 20 control subjects did not. Next, all subjects participated in a series of working memory tasks that asked them to recall a letter presented on a computer screen either one position back (lower difficulty), or 3 positions back (higher difficulty).
To induce anxiety, participants were informed they could be administered an unpleasant shock to the wrist at random times throughout the tasks, but only during a “threat period”, and not the “safe period”. To trigger their startle reflex, participants were also randomly sent bursts of white noise through headphones.
Electrodes that were placed near the subjects’ eyes measured their startle magnitude. Anxiety-potentiated startle was measured by calculating the difference in startle magnitude during the threat condition and the safe condition, thereby measuring the extent that startling was intensified by anxiety.
Results showed that for the control group, as the working memory task increased in difficulty, anxiety-potentiated startle dropped. This suggests that the more the memory task was challenging, the more it monopolized the subjects’ cognitive resources, leaving little resources for threat processing and thereby reducing their anxiety. Interestingly, in the high difficulty working memory task, subjects in the training condition showed greater anxiety-potentiated startle than did subjects in the control group. This suggests that the training session improved these subjects’ working memory, leaving more cognitive resources available to process threat, thus leading to increased anxiety.
Grillon and colleagues conclude that boosting cognitive abilities can free up mental resources that can be used for “task-irrelevant processing” such as threat. They say, “In order to better understand the influence of cognitive control in anxiety, it will be important for future studies to clarify how working memory relates to the subjective experience of anxiety and defense survival mechanisms.”
The study, “Better cognitive efficiency is associated with increased experimental anxiety”, was authored by Christian Grillon, Tiffany Lago, Sara Stahl, Alexis Beale, Nicholas Balderston, and Monique Ernst.
