Better cognitive efficiency is associated with increased experimental anxiety

Abstract

There is increased interest in the development of cognitive training targeting working memory (WM) to alleviate anxiety symptoms, but the effectiveness of such an approach is unclear. Improved understanding of the effect of cognitive training on anxiety may facilitate the development of more effective cognitive training treatment for anxiety disorders. This study uses an experimental approach to examine the interplay of WM and anxiety following WM training. Previous studies show that increased demand on WM reduces concurrent anxiety evoked by threat of shock (induced anxiety). However, improving WM pharmacologically or via exercise prevents this anxiolytic effect. Conceivably, improving WM frees up cognitive resources to process threat information, thereby increasing anxiety. The present study tested the hypothesis that practicing a high load WM (i.e., increased demand) task would improve WM, and thus, free cognitive resources to process threat of shock, resulting in more anxiety (i.e., greater startle) during a subsequent WM task. Participants were randomly assigned to two training groups. The active‐training group (N = 20) was trained on a 1‐ (low load) & 3‐back (high load) WM task, whereas the control‐training group (N = 20) performed a 0‐back WM task. The experimental phase, similar in both groups, consisted of a 1‐ & 3‐back WM task performed during both threat of shock and safety. As predicted, active training improved WM accuracy and increased anxiety during the experimental 3‐back WM task. Therefore, improving WM efficiency can increase anxiety, possibly by freeing WM resources to process threat information.

Recognition memory, primacy vs. recency effects, and time perception in the online version of the fear of scream paradigm

“…It has been shown that a threat of shock can modulate working memory performance in an N-back task 37 . The implementation of a distractor task after the encoding trials successfully blocked the rehearsal (silent repeating or elaboration) of information, as suggested by the absence of a recency effect.…”

The ‘Threat of Scream’ paradigm: a tool for studying sustained physiological and subjective anxiety

“…Indeed, most studies in normative samples that we are aware of only report the mean trait anxiety scores of their participants without performing any correlations between trait anxiety and physiological measures (e.g. 9,64,[71][72][73] , with the exception of 42 ). Future experiments should therefore further examine the interactions between (shock-and scream-induced) state anxiety and temperamental trait anxiety disposition.…”

Boldness moderates cognitive performance under acute threat: Evidence from a task-switching paradigm involving cueing for shock.

“…Follow-up work employing a within-subjects manipulation of threat conditions (acute and sustained, along with no-threat) would be particularly informative with respect to directly comparing the effects of different threat types on cognitive performance and their relationship to individual difference factors. Such work could help to interface findings from the current work with an emerging literature regarding the effects of predictable and unpredictable threat on cognitive performance (Balderston et al, 2020; Grillon et al, 2020).…”