Memory biases in anxious adolescents

Our understanding of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents remains limited despite high prevalence rates. Previous research has documented cognitive distortions in anxious children, including attentional and interpretive biases for threatening information. Memory, a crucial component of cognitive processing, has been largely unstudied. Of the few examinations of a possible memory bias in anxious youth, results have supported greater recall of negative information, but only when school-aged participants were told they were participating in a memory task.; The current study sought to expand upon these studies by using a previously ignored population, adolescents, and using a research paradigm with more real-world validity, vignettes. A sample of 102 adolescents aged 12 to 17 years were categorized as anxious or nonanxious based on their responses to a questionnaire. Participants listened to vignettes of positive and negative valence and completed memory tasks that asked for synonyms of embedded target words from the vignettes as well as direct recall questions. Memory tasks examined both implicit (indirect, nonconscious) and explicit (intentional, conscious) memory.; Results found that, when controlling for depression, anxious adolescents displayed memory biases in that they recalled significantly more information from the negative vignette and also recalled significantly less information from the positive vignette than did the nonanxious adolescents. These results were consistent across both implicit and explicit memory. Of the various subtypes of anxiety, generalized, social, somatic, and separation anxiety predicted memory biases. Of the demographic variables examined, only age and parents' education level were related to memory.; These findings suggest that adolescent anxiety may be a transitional period between childhood anxiety, typically associated with negative explicit memory biases, and adult anxiety, often associated with negative implicit memory biases. Results also speak to the potential relationship between memory biases and anxious adolescents' attentional biases, the extent to which worry may impact memory, and the role of personal saliency of negative information. The study demonstrates that memory biases should be considered among the cognitive distortions implicated in adolescent anxiety, and also suggests that psychotherapeutic interventions targeting memory biases may aid in ameliorating anxiety symptoms.