Failure to filter: anxious individuals show inefficient gating of threat from working memory

Abstract

Dispositional anxiety is a well-established risk factor for the development of psychiatric disorders along the internalizing spectrum, including anxiety and depression. Importantly, many of the maladaptive behaviors characteristic of anxiety, such as anticipatory apprehension, occur when threat is absent. This raises the possibility that anxious individuals are less efficient at gating threat's access to working memory, a limited capacity workspace where information is actively retained, manipulated, and used to flexibly guide goal-directed behavior when it is no longer present in the external environment. Using a well-validated neurophysiological index of working memory storage, we demonstrate that threat-related distracters were difficult to filter on average and that this difficulty was exaggerated among anxious individuals. These results indicate that dispositionally anxious individuals allocate excessive working memory storage to threat, even when it is irrelevant to the task at hand. More broadly, these results provide a novel framework for understanding the maladaptive thoughts and actions characteristic of internalizing disorders.

Interactions of emotion and anxiety on visual working memory performance

“…What is particularly notable within the present data is that fear cues were presented prior to memory arrays and were not relevant items to be memorised themselves. Because of this, our data suggest that, rather than anxious individuals having difficulty filtering out threatening information (Stout et al, 2013), threat may in itself impair the prioritisation of relevant over irrelevant signals within visual memory for acutely anxious individuals, acting separately from the general effect of internal/ external threat on basic memory performance.…”

“…However, it is fair to argue that contextualised factors of emotion could have influenced performance, which might compel a tempering of this conclusion. For instance, when threat stimuli were included in previous studies, effects on memory performance and filtering in relation to anxiety were exclusive to these stimuli (Stout et al, 2013; but, in tasks with solely neutral stimuli, the same results for these items also have been reported (Qi et al, 2014;Sari et al, in press;Stout & Rokke, 2010). Thus, the lack of an influence of anxiety on filtering efficiency following neutral cues in the present study does not entirely preclude the idea that internalised anxiety is capable of disrupting filtering efficiency in its own right.…”

“…Alternatively, the choice of presenting cues before encoding may have influenced the precise nature of interactions with state anxiety. Previous studies examining the role of threat and anxiety in modulating filtering efficiency performance have varied where threatening information is presented within trials, such as at encoding (Stout et al, 2013) or during the delay period where information is being maintained (Dolcos & McCarthy, 2006). There is evidence to suggest that such a choice is not arbitrary; McNab and Dolan (2014) found that distractors presented at encoding and during maintenance each account for unique variance in visual memory performance.…”

“…In addition, self-reported anxiety also appears to correlate positively with memory performance for nonaffective items (e.g., bar orientations; Moriya & Sugiura, 2012), although task-induced worry and state anxiety appear to have a contrary effect with reduced performance (Sari, Koster, & Derakshan, in press). What is widely supported, however, is that when additional task-irrelevant information is added to displays that participants are told to ignore and not memorise, memory performance is impaired, with anxiety correlating with reduced filtering efficiency particularly when irrelevant information is threatening (Moriya & Sugiura, 2012;Stout et al, 2013;Qi, Ding, & Li, 2014).…”

The effects of self-focus on attentional biases in social anxiety:An ERP study

“…After a retention interval, a test array is presented, and subjects are required to report whether or not any stimulus within the target hemifield has changed. The CDA has been used to examine biases in visual working memory for fearful facial expressions in anxious individuals (Stout, Shackman, & Larson, 2013).…”