Acute psychosocial stress and children’s memory

Abstract

We investigated whether children’s performance on working memory (WM) and delayed retrieval (DR) tasks decreased after stress exposure, and how physiological stress responses related to performance under stress. About 158 children (83 girls; M_age = 10.61 years, SD = 0.52) performed two WM tasks (WM forward and WM backward) and a DR memory task first during a control condition, and 1 week later during a stress challenge. Salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) and cortisol were assessed during the challenge. Only WM backward performance declined over conditions. Correlations between physiological stress responses and performance within the stress challenge were present only for WM forward and DR. For WM forward, higher cortisol responses were related to better performance. For DR, there was an inverted U-shape relation between cortisol responses and performance, as well as a cortisol × sAA interaction, with concurrent high or low responses related to optimal performance. This emphasizes the importance of including curvilinear and interaction effects when relating physiology to memory.

• Cortisol
• alpha-amylase
• middle childhood
• working memory
• delayed retrieval
• TSST-C

Acknowledgements

We thank the children who kindly participated in this study, their parents and all research assistants and students who assisted with data collection.

Notes

¹Analyzing the data without participants whose cortisol and/or sAA values had been winsorized yielded comparable results to those presented in the manuscript.

²It is important to note that although S3 was chosen to compute delta increase, cortisol and sAA levels were still elevated at S4, indicating that cortisol and sAA values were elevated throughout memory testing.

³Similar analyses performed for the control condition (n = 53) yielded no significant results.

⁴Reappraisal was measured with a Dutch version of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003, Dutch version by Koole, 2004) that was adapted to a state measure to be used with children (for details, see de Veld et al., 2012). The Pearson correlation between sqrt WMfw and reappraisal was significant (r = −0.17, p < 0.05), and indicated that more use of reappraisal was related to worse WMbw performance.