The Impact of Anxiety on Memory for Details in Spider Phobics

Wessel, Ineke

doi:10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199706)11:3<223::aid-acp444>3.0.co;2-4

Cited by 44 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…An alternative explanation relates to literature suggesting that anxious activation inhibits memory for peripheral details (see Christianson, 1992;Wessel & Merckelbach, 1997. According to the attention narrowing hypothesis, individuals who experience a state of physiological arousal direct their attentional resources toward threat-relevant information at the expense of threat-irrelevant information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is possible that anxious individuals accurately recall threat-relevant material that is actually present in their environment because they closely monitor it and direct a substantial amount of cognitive resources toward it (cf. Wessel & Merckelbach, 1997. However, because anxious individuals often catastrophize the implications of and exaggerate the distress associated with encounters with threat (Marks & Hemsley, 1999), it also is likely that they would be prone to recalling some aspects of threat that were never present.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Investigation of False Memories in Anxious and Fearful Individuals

Wenzel

Jostad

Brendle

et al. 2004

Behav. Cogn. Psychother.

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The present study applied the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm to examine whether anxious and fearful individuals exhibit higher recall and recognition rates of never presented threat words than nonanxious individuals. In Study 1, 39 spider fearful individuals, 28 blood fearful individuals, and 41 nonfearful individuals learned four word lists associated with unpresented target words: “spider”, “blood”, “river”, and “music”. Regardless of whether participants completed only a recognition task or a recall task and then a recognition task, there were no differences as a function of group in the degree to which they falsely remembered unpresented target threat words. In Study 2, 48 socially anxious and 51 nonanxious individuals learned four lists associated with social/evaluative threat unpresented target words and four lists associated with neutral unpresented target words. Similar to the findings from Study 1, groups did not differ in the degree to which they falsely remembered target words. These findings add to an increasingly large literature suggesting that anxious individuals are not characterized by a memory bias toward threat.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Investigation of False Memories in Anxious and Fearful Individuals

Wenzel

Jostad

Brendle

et al. 2004

Behav. Cogn. Psychother.

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“…(1) Negative emotional arousal enhances the recall of themes of events with reduced memory for details from before, during, and after the event in participating and witnessing agents (Adolphs, Tranel, & Denburg, 2000;Bornstein, Liebel, & Scarberry, 1998;Christianson, 1992;Christianson & Hü binette, 1993;Wessel & Merckelbach, 1997). Efforts to suppress the expression of negative emotion, as shown in film viewing experiments, impair further memory for non-visual material (Richards, 2004;Richards & Gross, 2000).…”

Section: Commentary Cognitive Consequences and Constraints On Reasonimentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions

Schjoedt

Sørensen

Nielbo

et al. 2013

Religion, Brain & Behavior

124

108

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We explore the cognitive effects of three common features of religious interactions: (1) demand for the expressive suppression of emotion; (2) exposure to goaldemoted and causally opaque actions; and (3) the presence of a charismatic authority. Using a cognitive resource model of executive function, we argue that these three features affect the executive system in ways that limit the capacity for individual processing of religious events. We frame our analysis in the context of a general assumption that collective rituals facilitate the transmission of cultural ideas. Building on recent experiments, we suggest that these three features increase participants' susceptibility to authoritative narratives and interpretations by preventing individuals from constructing their own accounts of the ritual event.

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“…The presence of emotional stimuli results in a central/peripheral tradeoff effect in memory (e.g., Wessel and Merckelbach, 1997; Kensinger et al, 2005, 2007). Prior work suggests that emotions change the nature of memory representations for the emotion-eliciting stimulus and surrounding neutral information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, participants were more accurate to identify repeated negative versus neutral central pictures, and less accurate to detect a change in the periphery if the peripheral objects were previously studied with a negative compared to a neutral picture (e.g., Wessel and Merckelbach, 1997; Brown, 2003; Kensinger et al, 2005). Interestingly, while emotion-impaired participants’ ability to detect a change in the peripheral objects, it did not modulate their ability to identify repeated peripheral objects (see: Kensinger et al, 2005, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye Movement Monitoring Reveals Differential Influences of Emotion on Memory

Riggs¹,

McQuiggan²,

Anderson³

et al. 2010

Front. Psychology

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Research shows that memory for emotional aspects of an event may be enhanced at the cost of impaired memory for surrounding peripheral details. However, this has only been assessed directly via verbal reports which reveal the outcome of a long stream of processing but cannot shed light on how/when emotion may affect the retrieval process. In the present experiment, eye movement monitoring (EMM) was used as an indirect measure of memory as it can reveal aspects of online memory processing. For example, do emotions modulate the nature of memory representations or the speed with which such memories can be accessed? Participants viewed central negative and neutral scenes surrounded by three neutral objects and after a brief delay, memory was assessed indirectly via EMM and then directly via verbal reports. Consistent with the previous literature, emotion enhanced central and impaired peripheral memory as indexed by eye movement scanning and verbal reports. This suggests that eye movement scanning may contribute and/or is related to conscious access of memory. However, the central/peripheral tradeoff effect was not observed in an early measure of eye movement behavior, i.e., participants were faster to orient to a critical region of change in the periphery irrespective of whether it was previously studied in a negative or neutral context. These findings demonstrate emotion's differential influences on different aspects of retrieval. In particular, emotion appears to affect the detail within, and/or the evaluation of, stored memory representations, but it may not affect the initial access to those representations.

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The Impact of Anxiety on Memory for Details in Spider Phobics

Cited by 44 publications

References 18 publications

An Investigation of False Memories in Anxious and Fearful Individuals

An Investigation of False Memories in Anxious and Fearful Individuals

Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions

Eye Movement Monitoring Reveals Differential Influences of Emotion on Memory

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