The effects of state anxiety, arousal, and emotion regulation on a facial working memory task with unpleasant distracters

The goal of this study was to examine factors responsible for the effects of unpleasant and neutral distracters on working memory. Experiment 1 showed that unpleasant distracters improved working memory accuracy but slowed reaction times. The improvement of working memory accuracy by unpleasant distracters correlated negatively with state anxiety and positively with arousal measured by skin conductance response. Experiment 2, an fMRI study using the same task, showed that prefrontal activity positively correlated with improvement of working memory accuracy on trials with unpleasant distracters compared to neutral distracters. Exploratory correlation analyses from Experiment 2 also revealed that fMRI activity resulting from a contrast between unpleasant and neutral distracters correlates negatively with state anxiety in pontine locus coeruleus and vlPFC (ventrolateral prefrontal cortex)---a possible neural mechanism for the effects of anxiety on working memory. Emotion regulation instructions did not affect working memory accuracy but did increase sustained activity in superior frontal, inferior temporal, and cerebellum and decrease sustained activity in the parahippocampus.