Poster Session 05 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
02:30 pm - 03:45 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 05: Neuropsychiatry | Addiction/Dependence | Stress/Coping | Emotional/Social Processes
Final Abstract #66
The Relationship Between Anxiety and Memory for Emotional Components of Images
Brianna Lenza, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, United States
Jaclyn Ford, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, United States
Category: Emotional and Social Processes
Keyword 1: anxiety
Keyword 2: emotional processes
Keyword 3: memory: normal
Objective:
Prior findings from our lab indicated that emotional content generally exhibits stronger memory for items at the expense of backgrounds compared to neutral information and these effects scale with anxiety. It has been shown that increased anxiety is associated with stronger trade-off between item background recognition accuracy for negative compared to neutral content (Waring, Payne, Schacter, Kensinger) However, it remains unclear whether increased anxiety is also associated with differential accuracy scores for positive content. Furthermore, whether these effects are consistent among typically developing individuals compared to those cognitively impaired remains unexplored. For example, individuals with Down Syndrome have shown to exhibit memory deficits although less work has examined emotional memory trade-off in this population.
Participants and Methods:
To address these gaps in the literature we recruited from a sample of typically developing (n = 28; mean age = 20.0, SD = 3.62) and Down Syndrome (n = 16; mean age = 20.3, SD = 3.33) individuals to complete a memory task for negative, neutral, and positive items that were encoded on neutral backgrounds. The age range of participants spanned from 15 to 27 years old. Items and backgrounds were presented separately during a recognition task after a 30 minute delay and participants were asked to indicate which items were “old” (previously seen) and which were “new” (had not been shown at encoding). Participants self-reported anxiety using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7).
Results:
Trade off scores were calculated as recognition accuracy for items compared to backgrounds within each valence category. We examined the interaction of the valence category by group by anxiety scores. We observed a main effect of valence category (p=0.004) such that on average, negative trade-off was higher than both positive and neutral trade-off. The main effect of valence was qualified by a significant interaction of valence by GAD-7 scores, such that follow-up correlation assessments revealed that participants reporting higher anxiety exhibited higher neutral trade-off coupled with lower positive trade off. Although participants with Down Syndrome exhibited overall worse memory performance, we observed no differences between groups in relative differences between valence categories or the interaction with anxiety.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest that increased anxiety is primarily associated with reduced item-background trade-off effects for positive content combined with increased trade-off for neutral content. Given that we observed no group differences, our findings suggest that the relationship between trade-off accuracy and anxiety is present in both typically developing individuals as well as those with Down Syndrome. Collectively, these effects provided a more nuanced understanding for the way in which emotional items are prioritized in memory scales with dispositional affect as well as how these effects remain consistent even when overall memory performance is impaired.
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