ArticlePsychophysiology2020
State anxiety reduces working memory capacity but does not impact filtering cost for neutral distracters.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Working memory capacity predicts cannabis-induced effects on alcohol urge.Addictive behaviors · 2026Trial
- Trial
- Could AI risk perception, AI learning anxiety and personal growth initiative influence university students' AI usage capability? An empirical investigation based on the control-value theory.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The predictive effects of AI anxiety on 21st-century skills and lifelong learning tendencies: a study of pre-service teachers in Northern Cyprus.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Influence of Multiple Factors on Musicology Doctoral Students' Academic Performance: An Empirical Study Based in China.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- A negative emotional state impairs individuals' ability to filter distractors from working memory: an ERP study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Understanding anxiety symptoms as aberrant defensive responding along the threat imminence continuum.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Practical tips to improve bedside teaching using learning theories and clinical reasoning.MedEdPublish (2016) · 2023Article
- Spatial navigation under threat: aversive apprehensions improve route retracing in higher versus lower trait anxious individuals.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Social threat and safety learning in individuals with adverse childhood experiences: electrocortical evidence on face processing, recognition, and working memory.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Article
- Financial Crisis in Management Stress: From the Perspective of Crisis Anxiety of Others.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Neutral and threatening distracter word stimuli are unnecessarily stored in working memory but do not differ in their degree of working memory storage.Biological psychology · 2021Article
- Working Memory Performance for Differentially Conditioned Stimuli.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Current theories propose that anxiety adversely impacts working memory (WM) by restricting WM capacity and interfering with efficient filtering of task-irrelevant information. The current study investigated the effect of shock-induced state anxiety on WM capacity and the ability to filter task-irrelevant neutral stimuli. We measured the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential that indexes the number of items maintained in WM, while participants completed a lateralized change detection task. The task included low and high WM loads, as well as a low load plus distracter condition. This design was used to assess WM capacity for low and high loads and investigate an individual's ability to filter neutral task-irrelevant stimuli. Participants completed the task under two conditions, threat of shock and safe. We observed a reduced CDA in the threat compared to the safe condition that was specific for high memory load. However, we did not find any differences in CDA filtering cost between threat and safe conditions. In addition, we did not find any differences in behavioral performance between the threat and safe conditions. These findings suggest that being in an anxious state reduces the neural representation for large amounts of information in WM, but have little effect on the filtering of neutral distracters.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.