Hold on to that feeling: Working memory and emotion from a cognitive neuroscience perspective.

Abstract

The recent resurgence of emotion research in all areas of psychology---especially cognitive psychology---indicates that the field may now be ready to traverse levels of inquiry across seemingly disparate phenomena. Recognizing the overlap in brain circuitry for emotion and cognition, Davidson (2000) argues that if we seek to understand either, we must not only study both, but also their interactions. The current project investigated the emotion-cognition interface through an experimental analysis of the construct of affective working memory. Two new delayed match-to-sample tasks were developed: an emotion maintenance task and a brightness maintenance task. Images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999) were used in these tasks. Stimulus pairs were assembled using normative emotional category and intensity data for these images, which were collected in a series of five studies (the results from which are also reported in this thesis). Two experiments revealed remarkably similar performance on the emotion and brightness maintenance tasks, apart from the brightness task being somewhat easier than the emotion task. While these performance similarities suggest that the underlying processes may also be similar, two selective interference studies indicate that this is not the case. In the first interference study, participants completed a visual search task during the retention interval. In the second interference study, participants completed the same visual search task, but also with articulatory suppression. Concurrent visual and verbal processing interfered with brightness maintenance and not emotion maintenance. Thus, emotion maintenance appears not to rely on either verbal or visual working memory, but rather on separable memory processes. I propose that maintenance of emotion relies on a system highly resembling the standard working memory model with the addition of an affective slave system. The implications for current working memory models are discussed with respect to several different modifications that could accommodate emotion.