Interactions between selective attention and working memory in emotion regulation [electronic resource] : an EEG investigation
Keywords: Psychology.

Selective attention and working memory (WM) are central to our ability to internally represent and act on the world, and a growing body of research suggests that the two interact in several ways. These interactions hold critical implications for emotion regulation, as they may underlie distinct forms of cognitive control that enable individuals to alter emotion. In this dissertation, I examine two types of selective attention-working memory interactions that may be important for emotion regulation: the gating of affective content into WM, and the biasing of affective content active within WM. Study 1 examined the immediate and delayed emotional consequences of controlling the gating of affective content into WM. Participants were presented with affective (and neutral) images during two phases. In an initial regulation phase, participants attempted to restrict the access of image representations into WM by loading WM with unrelated content. In a subsequent re-exposure phase, participants simply attended to these images. Results showed that, during the regulatory episode, loading WM while exposed to images rapidly and powerfully attenuated a robust electrocortical index of emotional response, the late positive potential (LPP). Upon re-exposure, however, images with a WM-load history paradoxically elicited heightened LPP responses (compared to images with a simple-viewing history). This pattern of findings diverged significantly from those obtained for another major form of emotion regulation -- cognitive reappraisal -- that permits encoding affective inputs into WM. Together, these results suggest that blocking the access of affective events into WM can quickly dampen emotion during the regulatory episode, a feature that may have unintended consequences upon passive re-exposure. Study 2 examined the emotional consequences of biasing affective content active within WM. Participants were cued to attend to either an arousing or neutral aspect of an affective image representation maintained within WM. Results showed that, relative to focusing on an arousing portion of a negative image representation within WM, focusing on a neutral portion reduced both LPP responses and self-reported negative emotion. These data suggest that deploying attention within affective representations active within WM can successfully alter emotion. Study 3 sought to replicate the findings obtained in Study 2, using a novel system to record electrocortical responses. Even under different recording conditions, results showed strong preservation of the original findings. Specifically, attending to a neutral (versus arousing) aspect of an unpleasant image representation within WM reduced both LPP responses and self-reported negative emotion. Study 4 examined whether the ability to bias affective content within WM via attention is impaired in a particular form of psychopathology -- generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) -- that may be characterized by deficits in the control of affective WM representations. Participants diagnosed with GAD and never-disordered healthy control (HC) participants were cued to attend to either an arousing or neutral aspect of an affective image representation active within WM. Contrary to predictions, results showed a failure to replicate the original findings in HC participants. Although the GAD group showed an inability to dampen LPP responses by shifting attention to neutral (versus arousing) aspects of affective WM content, the pattern of results is inconclusive due to a lack of expected findings in the HC group. Future studies will need to clarify the causes underlying the unexpected pattern of results amongst healthy participants.