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Abstract
Research on working memory has suggested domain-specific components for visual, verbal, and spatial information, and more recently for emotion. Affective working memory has been proposed as the set of processes involved in the maintenance of emotions to guide behaviour. The current study examined the reliability of an emotion maintenance/affective working memory task over two experimental sessions separated by one week. Subjective accuracy based on individual ratings was found to correlate over time and was highest for negatively valenced pictures. Results suggest that this paradigm is a reliable measure of emotion maintenance, underscoring the utility of this measure as an assessment tool for normative and clinical populations.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Amy Harrison, Hana Kubkova, Jen Chou, Jon Meyer-Shen, Lee Kaplowitz, Ivonne Melgar, and Jorie Pollak for their work on this project.
Notes
1Additional high-arousal picture pairs were added including, erotic, action adventure and threat pictures.
2This finding was in contrast to the Mikels et al. (2008) study, where performance on the brightness maintenance task was higher than the emotion maintenance task. One key difference is that in the current study accuracy scores were computed using participant-specific subjective ratings of the pictures, while in the Mikels et al. (2008) study concordance was used (i.e., “accuracy” was based on normed ratings of the pictures collected from a large sample of research participants), which may explain the difference.