The Relationship of Anxiety and Stress With Working Memory Performance in a Large Non-depressed Sample
: Lukasik M, Waris O, Soveri A, Lehtonen M, Laine M
Publisher: Frontiers Media
: 2019
: Frontiers in Psychology
: Frontiers in Psychology
: 10
: 9
: 1664-1078
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00004
: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/5a78f1da-a3ef-4e08-b14a-cb04688bf739
Clinical anxiety and acute stress caused by major life events have well-documented detrimental effects on cognitive processes, such as working memory (WM). However, less is known about the relationships of state anxiety or everyday stress with WM performance in non-clinical populations. We investigated the associations between these two factors and three WM composites (verbal WM, visuospatial WM, and n-back updating performance) in a large online sample of non-depressed US American adults. We found a trend for a negative association between WM performance and anxiety, but not with stress. Thus, WM performance appears rather robust against normal variation in anxiety and everyday stress.