All in Its Proper Time: Monitoring the Emergence of a Memory Bias for Novel, Arousing-Negative Words in Individuals with High and Low Trait Anxiety

Abstract

The well-established memory bias for arousing-negative stimuli seems to be enhanced in high trait-anxious persons and persons suffering from anxiety disorders. We monitored the emergence and development of such a bias during and after learning, in high and low trait anxious participants. A word-learning paradigm was applied, consisting of spoken pseudowords paired either with arousing-negative or neutral pictures. Learning performance during training evidenced a short-lived advantage for arousing-negative associated words, which was not present at the end of training. Cued recall and valence ratings revealed a memory bias for pseudowords that had been paired with arousing-negative pictures, immediately after learning and two weeks later. This held even for items that were not explicitly remembered. High anxious individuals evidenced a stronger memory bias in the cued-recall test, and their ratings were also more negative overall compared to low anxious persons. Both effects were evident, even when explicit recall was controlled for. Regarding the memory bias in anxiety prone persons, explicit memory seems to play a more crucial role than implicit memory. The study stresses the need for several time points of bias measurement during the course of learning and retrieval, as well as the employment of different measures for learning success.

Brief learning induces a memory bias for arousing-negative words: an fMRI study in high and low trait anxious persons

“…This has been shown for many stimulus types, such as pictures ( Bradley et al, 1992 ; Schupp et al, 2004a ; Touryan et al, 2007 ; Yegiyan and Yonelinas, 2011 ), faces ( Schupp et al, 2004b ), scenes ( Heuer and Reisberg, 1990 ), gestures ( Flaisch et al, 2011 ), and words ( Kissler et al, 2007 , 2009 ; Herbert et al, 2008 ; Scott et al, 2009 ; Laeger et al, 2012 ; Keuper et al, 2013 , 2014 ; Eden et al, 2014 ). The memory bias, especially for stimuli that are negative and arousing, seems more prominent in persons suffering from an anxiety disorder ( Calvo et al, 1994 ; Friedman et al, 2000 ; Dalgleish et al, 2003 ; Eysenck et al, 2007 ) or from a subclinically anxious personality ( Norton et al, 1988 ; McCabe, 1999 ; Russo et al, 2006 ; Mühlberger et al, 2009 ; Eden et al, 2014 ). The latter group exhibits high levels of trait anxiety, does not meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder, but is prone to develop one (e.g., McCabe, 1999 ; Russo et al, 2006 ; Mitte, 2008 ; Waldhauser et al, 2011 ).…”

“…Emotionally arousing situations and stimuli are processed preferentially. This has been shown by a vast body of studies, with methods ranging from simple behavioral measures to state-of-the-art imaging techniques (e.g., Junghöfer et al, 2001 ; Koster et al, 2006 ; Laeger et al, 2012 ; Eden et al, 2014 ; Weierich and Treat, 2015 ; for a meta-analysis, see Bar-Haim et al, 2007 ; for a review, see Cisler and Koster, 2010 ). Preferential processing leads to a memory bias, apparent in enhanced memory for emotional as compared to neutral stimuli.…”

“…Despite the many studies on emotion, our approach allows to address some important issues. First, we investigate memory bias for neutral stimuli that gain their emotional connotation via associative learning (similarly as in Eden et al, 2014 ). These stimuli possess no specific innate or learned valence (in contrast to a picture of an attacking tiger, or of a weapon).…”

“…In the following, we describe the rationale and the background of our learning design in more detail. With a statistical learning paradigm (e.g., Saffran et al, 1996 ; Breitenstein and Knecht, 2002 ; Saffran, 2002 ; Breitenstein et al, 2007 ; Cunillera et al, 2010 ; Eden et al, 2014 ; Laeger et al, 2014a ), neutral pseudowords were paired with either arousing-negative or neutral pictures. This paradigm implements an increased conjoint probability of two events (“correct pairings”) throughout the training, compared to two events with a random contingency (“incorrect pairings”).…”

Rapid prefrontal cortex activation towards aversively paired faces and enhanced contingency detection are observed in highly trait-anxious women under challenging conditions

“…First, anxiety disorders are much more common in women than men (e.g., Goodwin et al, 2005 ; Wittchen and Jacobi, 2005 ; Angst et al, 2015 ), so that females can be considered to be more at risk of suffering from anxiety than men. Second, results of a related investigation from our laboratory (Eden et al, 2014 ) suggested that even with a high effort in pre-screening we were unlikely to recruit a high trait-anxiety group with a balanced number of male and female participants. We thus admitted female participants only, to prevent unbalanced groups, reduce variance, and increase effect size.…”