Affective Working Memory

Working memory (WM) refers to the ability to maintain and manipulate a small amount of information in mind for brief periods (Baddeley, 1992), and affective working memory (AWM) refers to maintaining and working with a feeling state in mind (Mikels & Reuter-Lorenz, 2019). 

Previous Work: It is well established that cognitive working memory (WM) abilities tend to decline as we age. Previous research suggests that working memory ability for emotion (i.e., affective working memory (AWM)) may be resilient to age-related declines (Mikels et al., 2005). We aim to understand these diverging trajectories in memory performance across the lifespan. A prior project was pre-registered via OSF and involved recruiting 200+ participants aged 20-79 via Prolific. Our results were intriguing, as we found that AWM was preserved with age, but paradoxically, so was cognitive WM. These results require further investigation and replication with a more diverse, in-person sample. 

Current Work: Using an emotion maintenance task to measure AWM, Waugh et al. (2019) demonstrated that accuracy was poorer when maintaining negative emotions, especially in 1>2 trials (i.e., image 1 was judged to be more intense than image 2). In an effort to replicate this result, our lab has re-analyzed data from previous studies of AWM and non-affective WM, including positive, negative, and neutral images (Frank et al., 2021; 2023) in the form of a meta-analysis. In addition, we conducted a novel study to investigate the effects of intensity order and valence further. We found a negativity bias, such that our young adult samples had higher accuracy in the negatively valenced trials. In addition, we found a valence by intensity order interaction in the direction of superior negative 2>1 accuracy in the new study. Therefore, based on our lab results alone, we believe that negative emotions are easier to maintain than positive ones in a young adult sample.

Next Steps: To date, AWM has been exclusively studied using an emotion maintenance task using intense images. My next step is to design a second paradigm to measure AWM performance using videos rather than images. The goal of this project is to provide converging evidence that affective working memory is a separable subsystem from cognitive working memory.

Check out other ongoing research on the Cognitive and Affective Neuropsychology Lab website.