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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Effects Anxiety Has On Attentional Bias And Working Memory, Breana Mcswain Jan 2018

The Effects Anxiety Has On Attentional Bias And Working Memory, Breana Mcswain

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Research has shown that anxiety impairs attention and working memory, especially when it comes to completing a mentally demanding cognitive task such as the emotional Stroop paradigm or the n-back task. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether state anxiety affects behavioral performance on executive function tasks. State anxiety was induced using negatively valenced images from the International Affective Picture System, while neutral images served as the control. We compared behavioral performance between individuals in the negative mood induction against those in the neutral mood induction. Trait anxiety was used as a covariate for both groups. This allowed …


The Impact Of Emotion Regulation Strategies On Negative Affect And Working Memory Capacity, Jessie Kaye Weber Jan 2018

The Impact Of Emotion Regulation Strategies On Negative Affect And Working Memory Capacity, Jessie Kaye Weber

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Emotion regulation can be conceptualized as an individual’s ability to direct attention toward or away from a particular emotion eliciting stimuli (Gross, 2002). The current study examined the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies at reducing the impact of negative affect and the subsequent impact on working memory capacity. Previous studies found differences in the use of cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, and mindful attention as emotion regulation strategies in relation to positive affect but no comparison has been made in regards to negative affect. In the current study, individuals assigned to use expressive suppression reported significantly less increase in negative affect …