The effects of active worrying on working memory capacity

ABSTRACT

According to the attentional control theory, worry, a crucial component of anxiety, impairs task performance through its direct effect on working memory capacity (WMC) by using up the limited resources available for performance thus reducing attentional control. We tested this hypothesis in the current study by examining the causal influence of active worrying on WMC in a sample of undergraduate university students (n = 64) assigned either to a worry condition or to a non-worry control condition. Participants performed a change detection task before and after the worry/control manipulation. Mediation analyses showed that the level of self-reported worry mediated the effects of condition on change in WMC as demonstrated by the significant indirect effect of worry and the resulting non-significant direct effect of condition on change in WMC. Similar results were obtained when using state anxiety measures as mediating factors. Results of the current study are amongst the first to demonstrate that worry impairs WMC and as such have important implications for understanding the impact of worry.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety
• worry
• working memory capacity
• change detection
• attentional control

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to Gilles Pourtois and Igor Marchetti for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although bootstrapping is a recommended method that is also robust in smaller sample sizes, in our study the upper-lower bounds of the confidence intervals varied slightly upon repetition of the analyses. Increasing the number of bootstrap samples is one of the ways to overcome this problem (Hayes, 2013). Hence, we used 50,000 bias-corrected bootstrap while 5000 or 10,000 are usually acceptable numbers.

2 Mediation analyses with condition as an independent variable, change scores in WMC as a dependent variable and the level of worry as intervening factor in the distractor condition (b = −.0580; boot 95% CI = [−.3724, .1774]) and two-item condition (b = −.1227; boot 95% CI = [−.2923, 0801]) did not lead to significant indirect effects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO, #G094012N) awarded to Ernst H. W. Koster, Gilles Pourtois, & Nazanin Derakshan.