http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8612-4906
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ABSTRACT
The evidence for an anxiety-related memory bias is contradictory. We compiled 171 articles published until October 2016 including a group with clinical or subclinical anxiety and a control group in tasks involving implicit or explicit memory using threatening stimuli. There was an anxiety-related memory bias in free recall tasks, but it was not observed in another memory task. The between-groups differences showed that the anxious group recalled more threatening stimuli than the control group (d = 0.321). When we compared the group differences (anxious vs. control participants) in the within-groups effect (threatening vs. neutral stimuli), a moderate effect size emerged (dbw = 0.714). This anxiety-related memory bias was observed with shallow processing, that is consistent with attentional biases related to anxiety. There was also evidence that high-anxious persons recall fewer positive stimuli. Future research is needed to investigate whether this result is a memory or encoding bias and explore other moderator variables.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Sara Herrera http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8612-4906
Ignacio Montorio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6113-4921
Isabel Cabrera http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8362-764X
Juan Botella http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8633-4981
Notes
1 Among the studies included, there are outlier effect sizes that could be increasing the combined effect size (the studies of Johnson, Craske & Aikins, Citation2008; Russo, Fox, Bellinger, & Nguyen-Van-Tam, Citation2001; Russo et al., Citation2006). When these outliers are excluded from the analysis, the effect size is still significant (d = 0.21, 95% CI [0.12, 0.29]).