An investigation of the relations between stress and prospective memory

Abstract

Prospective memory (PM) is a future-oriented memory system that entails "remembering to remember" intentions, or to perform actions in the future. People spend significant portions of their day-today lives forming and acting on intentions, and the ability to successfully generate, retain, and complete these intentions has important implications for one's daily functioning and quality of life. Another common human experience is stress, whether that be short-term, acute stress, or long-term, chronic stress. Despite the significance and ubiquity of both PM and stress, the research base documenting the relations between them is sparse. This topic area necessitates additional research to delineate the interactions between stress and PM. The current study provides novel data towards that effort, and is the first empirical study investigating how stress relates with non-focal event-based PM. The results demonstrate that acute stress induction procedures did not produce significant differences in non-focal event-based PM performance, or time-based PM performance. However, among a smaller subset of those in the experimental group who reported the highest levels of stress, increasing levels of acute stress correlated significantly with higher non-focal event-based PM performance. Further, stress at the outset of the study correlated significantly with enhanced time-based PM as well as monitoring behavior. These results may have important implications and contribute to our developing understanding of the relations between stress and the ability to carry out intentions in the future.

Hope as a protective factor for cognitive difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…These early findings suggest that impaired cognition may be a negative outcome that will be observed worldwide. Although research regarding COVID-19 is limited, an extensive body of research has established the negative impacts of high stress on cognition [ 5 – 8 ]. This research coupled with early findings revealing the negative cognitive outcomes associated with COVID-19 highlight the importance of studying the relations between stress and COVID-19, and their impact on cognition.…”