The interplay of trait worry and trait anxiety in determining episodic retrieval: The role of cognitive control

ABSTRACT

Worrying is a key concept in describing the complex relationship between anxiety and cognitive control. On the one hand, cognitive control processes might underlie the specific tendency to engage in worrying (i.e., trait worry), conceptualized as a future-oriented mental problem-solving activity. On the other hand, the general tendency to experience the signs and symptoms of anxiety (i.e., trait anxiety) is suggested to impair cognitive control because worrisome thoughts interfere with task-relevant processing. Based on these opposing tendencies, we predicted that the effect of the two related constructs, trait anxiety and trait worry, might cancel out one another. In statistics, such instances have been termed suppressor situations. In four experiments, we found evidence for such a suppressor situation: When their shared variance was controlled, trait worry was positively whereas trait anxiety was negatively related to performance in a memory task requiring strategic, effortful retrieval. We also showed that these opposing effects are related to temporal context reinstatement. Our results suggest that trait worry and trait anxiety possess unique sources of variance, which differently relate to performance in memory tasks requiring cognitive control.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive control/executive functions
• Context reinstatement
• Episodic memory
• Suppressor situation
• Worry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Because a minimum lag value of 1 would imply that all words are counted, the value of l was varied between 2 and 10.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hungarian Brain Research Program (KTIA NAP grant number 13-2-2014-0020). The preparation of the paper was also supported by the Early Carrier Stimulus Award rewarded to the first author by The European Society for Cognitive Psychology.