Distinct Effects of Anxiety and Depression on Updating Emotional Information in Working Memory

Yuting Zhang, Teresa Boemo, Zhiling Qiao, Yafei Tan and Xu Li ()
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Yuting Zhang: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior (CCNU), Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430070, China
Teresa Boemo: Faculty of Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Zhiling Qiao: Department of Neuroscience, Research Group Psychiatry, Center for Clinical Psychiatry, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Yafei Tan: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior (CCNU), Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430070, China
Xu Li: Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior (CCNU), Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430070, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Anxiety and depression have been shown to negatively influence the processing of emotional information in working memory. However, most studies have examined anxiety-related or depression-related working memory deficits independently, without considering their high co-morbidity. We tested the effects of emotional valence on working memory performance among healthy young adults with varying levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Ninety young adults aged between 18–24 (51 female) completed an emotional 2-back task in which positive, negative, and neutral images were presented. Multi-level modeling was used to examine anxiety and depressive symptoms as predictors of response accuracy and latency across the three emotional valence conditions. The results showed that participants responded to negative images with the highest accuracy and to positive images with the lowest accuracy. Both negative and positive images elicited slower responses than neutral images. Importantly, we found that more severe anxiety symptoms predicted a smaller difference in response accuracy between negative and neutral stimuli, whereas more severe depressive symptoms predicted a larger updating reaction time difference between positive and neutral stimuli. These findings demonstrated the uniquely anxiety-related deficits in processing negative contents and the uniquely depression-related deficits in updating positive contents in working memory, thus highlighting the necessity of novel cognitive bias modification interventions targeting the anxiety-specific and depression-specific deficits in working memory.

Keywords: anxiety; depression; emotional valence; working memory updating (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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