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In daily life, emotions come and go—often influencing our thoughts, decisions, and actions. Understanding this influence is crucial for developing a comprehensive psychological science. Pivotal to this quest is understanding how emotions interact with working memory, the cognitive system that holds information actively in mind to be worked with and manipulated for reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Emotion and working memory can interact in three basic ways or modes: (a) emotion may modulate working memory, (b) working memory may modulate emotion, and (c) emotions can be memoranda (i.e., things that are remembered) within working memory. Each mode will be considered in turn.

Emotional Influences on Working Memory

Here we consider emotion as the independent variable and working memory performance—measured by accuracy and speed—as the dependent variable. Intuitively, one would expect a person's emotional state or mood to influence working memory. Indeed, the science bears this out in intriguing and complex ways. For example, positive emotion has been shown to improve verbal working memory performance, whereas negative emotion impairs it. The opposite occurs for spatial working memory: Negative emotion can improve performance, whereas positive emotion can impair it. This pattern, known as a double dissociation, aligns well with some models of hemispheric specialization; evidence indicates that language processes and positive affect are lateralized to the left hemisphere, whereas visuospatial processes and negative affect are lateralized to the right. Nevertheless, other studies find minimal effects of emotion on working memory. Inconsistent outcomes could be due to weak levels of emotional arousal and to differences in methodology. Emotional states such as anxiety and emotional disorders such as depression can have a broad-based impact on many cognitive domains, including working memory. Future research will need to investigate the specificity of these effects and how individual differences in affective/personality traits influence working memory.

Working memory performance can also be affected by the emotional valence of the memoranda. For example, performance may differ when remembering emotional versus neutral words, faces, or pictures. However, the research results depend on the specific process under investigation and on the emotion of the stimulus: Angry expressions may enhance working memory for facial identity, updating the contents of working memory may be slowed by negative words, and interference from prior episodes may be reduced by emotional words. Working memory ability can also be compromised by unexpected emotional stimulation, and these adverse effects may be reduced by the operations of specialized brain mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex.

Working Memory Influences on Emotion

The second mode of interaction relates to how cognition can modify, control, or regulate emotion. Here, emotion is the dependent variable. For example, does our susceptibility to intruding emotions depend on how much or how little working memory is preoccupied with some cognitive task? Research on this question is surprisingly sparse. Some evidence indicates that engaging working memory with demanding math problems can reduce negative affect evoked by disturbing pictures. Working memory might be useful for distracting the mind from emotional experiences, subsequently regulating the emotion. Future research is needed to investigate this mode of regulation and whether individual differences in working memory capacity influence emotional responsivity and regulation.

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