Anxiety and retrieval inhibition: support for an enhanced inhibition account

Retrieval inhibition of negative associations is important for exposure therapy for anxiety, but the relationship between memory inhibition and anxiety is not well understood—anxiety could either be associated with enhanced or deficient inhibition. The present study tested these two competing hypotheses by measuring retrieval inhibition of negative stimuli by related neutral stimuli. Non-clinically anxious undergraduates completed measures of trait and state anxiety and completed a retrieval induced forgetting task. Adaptive forgetting varied with state anxiety. Low levels of state anxiety were associated with no evidence for retrieval inhibition for either threatening or non-threatening categories. Participants in the middle tertile of state anxiety scores exhibited retrieval inhibition for non-threatening categories but not for threatening categories. Participants in the highest tertile of state anxiety, however, exhibited retrieval inhibition for both threatening and non-threatening categories with the magnitude of retrieval inhibition being greater for threatening than non-threatening categories. The data are in line with the avoidance aspect of the vigilance–avoidance theory of anxiety and inhibition. Implications for cognitive behavioural therapy practices are discussed.     

Understanding the role of mind wandering in stress-related working memory impairments

Mind wandering has been identified as a possible cause for stress-related working memory (WM) task impairments following laboratory stressors. The current study attempted to induce mind wandering regarding negative, positive, or neutral events using an expressive writing task and examined the impact on WM task performance. We examined the role of mind wandering in understanding the impact of life stress on WM. Additionally, we explored the role of thought suppression on the relationship between mind wandering and WM. One hundred and fifty participants completed WM measures before (Time 1) and after (Time 2) the writing manipulation. The writing manipulation did not alter mind wandering or WM task performance. Time 1 WM predicted mind wandering during the Time 2 WM task, which subsequently predicted poorer Time 2 WM task performance. The impact of daily life stress on WM was mediated by mind wandering. Trait levels of thought suppression moderated the impact of mind wandering on WM. Specifically, higher levels of suppression resulted in stronger negative impact of mind wandering on WM task performance. Findings are discussed in terms of the impact of mind wandering on WM task performance.     

Angry faces are more resistant to forgetting than are happy faces: directed forgetting effects on the identity of emotional faces

Using the item-method directed forgetting paradigm (i.e. intentionally forgetting specified information), we examined directed forgetting of facial identity as a function of facial expression and the sex of the expresser and perceiver. Participants were presented with happy and angry male and female faces cued for either forgetting or remembering, and were then asked to recognise previously studied faces from among a series of neutral faces. For each recognised test face, participants also recalled the face’s previously displayed emotional expression. We found that angry faces were more resistant to forgetting than were happy faces. Furthermore, angry expressions on male faces and happy expressions on female faces were recognised and recalled better than vice versa. Signal detection analyses revealed that male faces gave rise to a greater sensitivity than female faces did, and male participants, but not female participants, showed greater sensitivity to male faces than to female faces. Several theoretical implications are discussed.     

Acute memory deficits in chemotherapy-treated adults

Data from research on amnesia and epilepsy are equivocal with regards to the dissociation, shown in animal models, between rapid and slow long-term memory consolidation. Cancer treatments have lasting disruptive effects on memory and on brain structures associated with memory, but their acute effects on synaptic consolidation are unknown. We investigated the hypothesis that cancer treatment selectively impairs slow synaptic consolidation. Cancer patients and their matched controls were administered a novel list-learning task modelled on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Learning, forgetting, and retrieval were tested before, and one day after patients’ first chemotherapy treatment. Due to difficulties recruiting cancer patients at that sensitive time, we were only able to study 10 patients and their matched controls. Patients exhibited treatment-dependent accelerated forgetting over 24 hours compared to their own pre-treatment performance and to the performance of control participants, in agreement with our hypothesis. The number of intrusions increased after treatment, suggesting retrieval deficits. Future research with larger samples should adapt our methods to distinguish between consolidation and retrieval causes for treatment-dependent accelerated forgetting. The presence of significant accelerated forgetting in our small sample is indicative of a potentially large acute effect of chemotherapy treatment on forgetting, with potentially clinically relevant implications.     

On Being Found: How Habitual Patterns of Thought Influence Creative Interest,Behavior, and Ability

This study on 138 undergraduate students used path analysis to investigate the relationship between creativity (interest, measured by a creative activities survey; and ability: fluency, originality, and elaboration) and different aspects of thought patterns presumed to influence the preparation and illumination phase of the creative process: habitual patterns of thought (ruminative brooding, ruminative self-reflection), thought suppression, thought intrusion, mind wandering, and associative ability. Such relationship was hinted at in Wallas’s classical model of the creative sequence, but is rarely investigated. We found that creative behavior/interest was driven by self-reflection, thought intrusion, and the lack of a need for thought suppression; creative ability was fueled mainly by associative ability. The only variable that influenced both aspects of creativity was the lack of resistance to thought suppression; this distinguished the creativity variables from dysphoria, which was associated with a desire for thought suppression. The results suggest that what drives the need to create is not creative ability per se, but rather self-focused attention, as well as the feeling or experience of being found by thought, rather than finding it. That is, the need to create is associated with having thoughts that interrupt one’s ordinary stream of consciousness and that are seen as welcome rather than interfering.     

提取引起的遗忘的认知机制

提取引起的遗忘(RIF)指提取某个信息导致对其它相关信息的遗忘,揭示其内在机制是记忆和遗忘领域的一个重要的研究课题。近20年来,各路研究者分别从干扰理论、抑制理论或情境依赖说出发,试图找到引发RIF的唯一的认知机制。基于对有关RIF的认知机制的实证研究的系统分析,可以发现三个理论均有一定的支持证据,因此导致RIF的原因可能包括抑制、干扰和情境的改变等三个方面。今后该领域可结合多种技术手段对这一多元论观点进行直接的检验。     

Motion-induced blindness does not affect the formation of negative afterimages

Aftereffects induced by invisible stimuli constitute a powerful tool to investigate what type of neural information processing can occur in the absence of visual awareness. This approach has been successfully used to demonstrate that awareness of oriented gratings or translating stimuli is not necessary to obtain a robust orientation-specific or motion-specific aftereffect. We exploit motion-induced blindness (MIB, Bonneh, Cooperman, & Sagi, 2001) to investigate the related question of the influence of visual awareness on the formation of negative afterimages. Our results show that MIB does not affect the persistence and intensity of afterimages. Thus, there is no significant contribution to the formation of afterimages beyond the sites mediating MIB.     

How to suppress obsessive thoughts

Thought suppression (i.e. consciously trying to avoid certain thoughts from entering consciousness) has been argued to be an inadequate strategy in case of unwanted intrusions. That is, thought suppression seems to result in more rather than less intrusions. Although this experimental finding has been explained in terms of failing attempts to distract oneself from the target thought, the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI; a scale that measures chronic thought suppression tendencies) does not address the means by which respondents try to suppress unwanted thoughts. To examine which strategies of mental control people use to suppress unwanted thoughts, obsessive-compulsive disorder patients (N=47) completed the WBSI, the Thought Control Questionnaire, and two measures of psychopathology. Results suggest that the crucial mechanism in thought suppression may not be distraction, but self-punishment.     

On the form of the forgetting function: the effects of arithmetic and logarithmic distributions of delays

Forgetting functions with 18 delay intervals were generated for delayed matching-to-sample performance in pigeons. Delay interval variation was achieved by arranging five different sets of five delays across daily sessions. In different conditions, the delays were distributed in arithmetic or logarithmic series. There was no convincing evidence for different effects on discriminability of the distributions of different delays. The mean data were better fitted by some mathematical functions than by others, but the best-fitting functions depended on the distribution of delays. In further conditions with a fixed set of five delays, discriminability was higher with a logarithmic distribution of delays than with an arithmetic distribution. This result is consistent with the treatment of the forgetting function in terms of generalization decrement.