Threat directionality modulates defensive reactions in humans: cardiac and electrodermal responses.

Features of threatening cues and the associated context influence the perceived imminence of threat and the defensive responses evoked. To provide additional knowledge about how the directionality of a threat (i.e. directed-towards or away from the viewer) might impact defensive responses in humans, participants were shown pictures of a man carrying a gun (threat) or nonlethal object (neutral) directed-away from or towards the participant. Cardiac and electrodermal responses were collected. Compared to neutral images, threatening images depicting a gun directed-towards the participant induced sustained bradycardia and an increased electrodermal response, interpreted as immobility under attack. This defensive immobility reaction is evoked by high perceived threat and inescapable situations and indicates intense action preparation. Pictures of guns directed-away from the participant induced shorter bradycardia and no significant modulation of the electrodermal response compared to neutral pictures, which might be consistent with the perception of a less threatening situation. The results show that the directionality of threat stimuli is a key factor that prompts different patterns of defensive responses.

The pictorial set of Emotional Social Interactive Scenarios between Chinese Adults (ESISCA): Development and validation.

Affective picture databases with a single facial expression or body posture in one image have been widely applied to investigate emotion. However, to date, there was no standardized database containing the stimuli which involve multiple emotional signals in social interactive scenarios. The current study thus developed a pictorial set comprising 274 images depicting two Chinese adults' interactive scenarios conveying emotions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and neutral. The data of the valence and arousal ratings of the scenes and the emotional categories of the scenes and the faces in the images were provided in the present study. Analyses of the data collected from 70 undergraduate students suggested high reliabilities of the valence and arousal ratings of the scenes and high judgmental agreements in categorizing the scene and facial emotions. The findings suggested that the present dataset is well constructed and could be useful for future studies to investigate the emotion recognition or empathy in social interactions in both healthy and clinical (e.g., ASD) populations.

Links between social avoidance and frontal alpha asymmetry during processing emotional facial stimuli: An exploratory study.

Individuals who are socially avoidant actively remove themselves from opportunities for social interaction and have a strong desire for solitude. Although social avoidance is associated with a host of adjustment difficulties, its neural substrates remain under-explored. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory study to compare electroencephalography (EEG) frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) scores during processing emotional facial stimuli in socially avoidant and non-withdrawn comparison individuals. From an original sample of N = 384 undergraduate students, 25 avoidant and 27 comparison individuals were identified. For this subset of participants, EEG modulations and self-reported experience ratings during a picture processing task were assessed. Among the results, the socially avoidant group's ratings of positive stimuli were significantly lower than the non-withdrawn comparison group. The socially avoidant group also had significantly lower FAA scores in response to positive stimuli than the comparison group. Further, asymmetry scores of the comparison group in the positive conditions were higher than in the negative and neutral conditions. However, there were no significant differences between these three conditions in the socially avoidant group. Our results suggest that socially avoidant individuals may eschew interpersonal relationships because of a relatively greater right hemisphere cortical activity, which may contribute to a withdrawal motivation when confronted with negative emotional stimuli in social contexts.

Investigation of phase synchronization in functional brain networks of children with ADHD using nonlinear recurrence measure.

Measuring the phase synchronization between different brain regions in functional brain networks is a common approach to investigate many psychological disorders such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The emotional processing deficit in ADHD children is one of the main obstacles in their social interactions. In this study, the nonlinear Correlation between Probability of Recurrences (CPR) method is used for the first time to construct functional brain networks of 22 boys with ADHD and 22 healthy ones during watching four visual-emotional stimuli types. Topological features of brain networks, including shortest path length, clustering coefficient, and nodes strengths, are investigated in groups of ADHD and healthy. The results indicate a significantly (P-Values < 0.01) greater average clustering coefficient and lower shortest path length in the brain networks of ADHD individuals than the healthy ones. Accordingly, in the ADHD brain networks, the information exchange in both local and global scales is abnormally more than the healthy ones, leading to a hyper-synchronization in this group. The topological alterations of ADHD brain networks are mainly observed in the brain's frontal and occipital lobes, indicating impaired brain function of this group in emotional and visual processing. This survey demonstrates that the CPR method can be a good candidate for distinguishing the phase interactions of ADHD and healthy brain networks. Therefore, this study can contribute to further insights into the nonlinear dynamics analysis of brain networks in ADHD individuals.

High media multitasking habit influences self-referential emotional memory.

Previous research (Ophir et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 106(37):15583-15587, 10.1073/pnas.0903620106, 2009; Uncapher and Wagner in Proc Natl Acad Sci 115(40):9889-9896, 10.1073/pnas.1611612115, 2018; Wiradhany and Koerts in Media Psychol 24(2):276-303, 10.1080/15213269.2019.1685393, 2021) suggested that different groups (high, low, and moderate) of habitual media multitaskers process information differently. Most of these studies focused on comprehending the cognitive differences among them. But there is considerably less information on their differences in processing emotional stimuli. In this article, using self-referential emotional stimuli ('positive/likeable' and 'negative/dislikeable' words), we aim to examine whether there is any difference in the self-referential emotional memory among different groups of media multitaskers (HMM, MMM, and LMM) using a recall and recognition paradigm. We also investigate whether HMM, MMM, and LMM vary in an emotional categorization task. A total of 120 students (mean age = 20.9 years; males = 84) voluntarily participated and self-reported their preferences for media multitasking using a questionnaire (Ophir et al. 2009). A total of 50 self-referenced words (positive/likeable and negative/dislikeable) were presented to them on a computerized screen for an emotional categorization task. Afterward, they performed a surprise free recall and a recognition task of the same words. Results suggested that HMM were faster in liking 'positive/likeable' words over 'negative/dislikeable' words in emotional categorization tasks in comparison with LMM and MMM. HMM and MMM performed poorly in both the recall and recognition of 'positive/likeable' emotional words compared to LMM. No significant difference was observed in recall and recognition between HMM and MMM. The three groups did not differ significantly in the recall and recognition tasks related to 'negative/dislikeable' emotional words. These findings help understand the differences in processing self-related emotional stimuli among different groups of media multitaskers.

The Effect of Menstrual Cycle Phases on Approach-Avoidance Behaviors in Women: Evidence from Conscious and Unconscious Processes.

The menstrual cycle affects women's emotional states, with estrogen and progesterone having predominant roles. However, it remains unclear whether the phases of the menstrual cycle also affect women's motivational behaviors. In this study, the main aim was to investigate how the menstrual cycle influences approach-avoidance behavior under conditions of conscious versus unconscious processing of emotions. Briefly, after recruitment by advertisement and screening with a menstrual cycle survey questionnaire, 27 naturally cycling, healthy women participated in an improved "manikin task" and were presented both positive and negative emotional stimuli during early follicular, late follicular, and mid-luteal phases. Estrogen and progesterone levels were measured. Women in the late follicular phase exhibited the shortest response times for approaching positive stimuli, while women in the mid-luteal phase exhibited the shortest response times for avoiding negative stimuli. Estrogen and progesterone levels significantly correlated with the speed of the approach-avoidance responses observed for the women, indicating the important role that sex hormones have in mediating emotionally motivated behavior. Overall, these findings suggest that the menstrual cycle has strong and specific influences on women's approach-avoidance behaviors that are in part mediated by estrogen and progesterone. By identifying characteristics of these behaviors in the late follicular and mid-luteal phases, greater insight can be provided to women regarding the physiological influences of the menstrual cycle on their personal growth and security.

Intranasal oxytocin alters attention to emotional facial expressions, particularly for males and those with depressive symptoms.

Intranasal oxytocin (OT) can enhance emotion recognition, perhaps by promoting increased attention to social cues. Some studies indicate that individuals with difficulties processing social information, including those with psychopathology, show more pronounced effects in response to OT. As such, there is interest in the potential therapeutic use of OT in populations with deficits in social cognition. The present study examined the effects of intranasal OT on the processing of facial features and selective attention to emotional facial expressions, as well as whether individual differences in depressive symptom severity predict sensitivity to intranasal OT. In a double-blind placebo-controlled within-subject design, eye tracking was used to measure attention to facial features in an emotional expression appraisal task, and attention to emotional expressions in a free-viewing task with a quadrant of multiple faces. OT facilitated the processing of positive cues, enhancing the maintenance of attention to the mouth region of happy faces and to happy faces within a quadrant, with similar effect sizes, despite the latter effect not being statistically significant. Further, persons with depressive symptoms, and particularly males, were sensitive to OT's effects. For males only, OT, relative to placebo, increased attentional focus to the mouth region of all faces. Individuals with depressive symptoms showed less attentional focus on angry (males only) and sad facial expressions, and more attention to happy faces (particularly for males). Results indicate increased sensitivity to OT in males and persons at risk for depression, with OT administration promoting a positive bias in selective attention to social stimuli.

Visual Event-Related Potentials under External Emotional Stimuli in Bipolar I Disorder with and without Hypersexuality.

Hypersexuality is related to functions of personality and emotion and is a salient symptom of bipolar I disorder especially during manic episode. However, it is uncertain whether bipolar I disorder with (BW) and without (BO) hypersexuality exhibits different cerebral activations under external emotion stimuli. In 54 healthy volunteers, 27 BW and 26 BO patients, we administered the visual oddball event-related potentials (ERPs) under external emotions of Disgust, Erotica, Fear, Happiness, Neutral, and Sadness. Participants' concurrent states of mania, hypomania, and depression were also evaluated. The N1 latencies under Erotica and Happiness were prolonged, and the P3b amplitudes under Fear and Sadness were decreased in BW; the P3b amplitudes under Fear were increased in BO. The parietal, frontal, and occipital activations were found in BW, and the frontal and temporal activations in BO under different external emotional stimuli, respectively. Some ERP components were correlated with the concurrent affective states in three groups of participants. The primary perception under Erotica and Happiness, and voluntary attention under Fear and Sadness, were impaired in BW, while the voluntary attention under Fear was impaired in BO. Our study indicates different patterns of visual attentional deficits under different external emotions in BW and BO.

Characteristics of Facial Muscle Activity Intensity in Patients With Schizophrenia and Its Relationship to Negative Symptoms.

Introduction: Previous studies have shown that in addition to having impairments in facial emotion recognition, patients with schizophrenia also show a lack of facial expression. Although negative symptoms such as decreased facial activity are common symptoms of schizophrenia, the related factors remain inconclusive. Therefore, this study compared healthy controls to explore the characteristics of facial muscle activity intensity in patients with schizophrenia and its relationship with negative symptoms. Methods: This observational and cross-sectional study conducted in a psychiatric hospital in China included a total of 135 patients with schizophrenia and 134 healthy controls. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia were evaluated using the Brief Negative Symptom Scale. The intensity of facial muscle activity under positive, neutral, and negative emotional stimuli conditions was automatically collected by a computer, including 17 values (F01-F17) that represent different facial muscle activities. Statistical tests were performed to analyze facial muscle activity indexes, to explore an objective and quantitative method to evaluate the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Results: The facial muscle activity intensity of the schizophrenia group at F02 (outer eyebrow), F04 (upper eyelid), F07 (nose), F10 (dimple), F12 (lower jaw 1), F14 (lip 2), and F17 (blink) was lower than that of the healthy controls (p < 0.05). Under positive, neutral, and negative emotional stimuli conditions, the facial muscle activity intensity of F16 (lower jaw 2) was positively correlated with negative symptoms (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Our study indicated that patients with schizophrenia show defects in facial muscle activity and that is associated with negative symptoms.

Low versus high level of response to alcohol affects amygdala functional connectivity during processing of emotional stimuli.

BACKGROUND: Low levels of response (low LR) to alcohol predict heavy drinking and alcohol problems. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of emotion processing have shown that low LR individuals exhibit lower activation in task-related brain regions following both placebo and alcohol administration, but these studies did not examine functional brain networks that might contribute to the phenomena. The current study expands upon the earlier results by evaluating whether functional connectivity differences between the amygdala and other brain regions modulated by emotional face processing are associated with LR. Based on prior findings, we hypothesized that low LR is related to lower functional connectivity in fronto-amygdalar functional circuits, which underlie the processing of emotional stimuli. METHODS: Secondary analyses were conducted on data from a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects, cross-over study in 108 18-to-25-year-old low and high LR sex-matched pairs without alcohol use disorder at baseline. Participants performed modified emotional faces processing tasks after receiving placebo or approximately 0.7 ml/kg of ethanol. Psychophysiological interaction analyses examined functional connectivity between left and right amygdalae and related brain circuits using LR-by-alcohol general linear models. The data included 54 sex-matched pairs with 216 fMRI scans comprising alcohol and placebo conditions. RESULTS: Compared with individuals with high LR, low LR subjects demonstrated lower functional connectivity between the amygdala and the frontal lobes, insula, and parietal regions, while processing angry and happy faces. Interactions showed lower connectivity following alcohol in low LR and higher connectivity in high LR groups. CONCLUSIONS: Low LR individuals demonstrated lower functional connectivity in response both to placebo and a modest dose of ethanol. Attenuated connectivity among low LR individuals when processing emotional faces may contribute to an impaired ability to recognize alcohol intoxication in social situations and to appraise angry and happy emotions irrespective of whether alcohol is consumed.

Altered effective connectivity in migraine patients during emotional stimuli: a multi-frequency magnetoencephalography study.

BACKGROUND: Migraine is a common and disabling primary headache, which is associated with a wide range of psychiatric comorbidities. However, the mechanisms of emotion processing in migraine are not fully understood yet. The present study aimed to investigate the neural network during neutral, positive, and negative emotional stimuli in the migraine patients. METHODS: A total of 24 migraine patients and 24 age- and sex-matching healthy controls were enrolled in this study. Neuromagnetic brain activity was recorded using a whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) system upon exposure to human facial expression stimuli. MEG data were analyzed in multi-frequency ranges from 1 to 100 Hz. RESULTS: The migraine patients exhibited a significant enhancement in the effective connectivity from the prefrontal lobe to the temporal cortex during the negative emotional stimuli in the gamma frequency (30-90 Hz). Graph theory analysis revealed that the migraine patients had an increased degree and clustering coefficient of connectivity in the delta frequency range (1-4 Hz) upon exposure to positive emotional stimuli and an increased degree of connectivity in the delta frequency range (1-4 Hz) upon exposure to negative emotional stimuli. Clinical correlation analysis showed that the history, attack frequency, duration, and neuropsychological scales of the migraine patients had a negative correlation with the network parameters in certain frequency ranges. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggested that the individuals with migraine showed deviant effective connectivity in viewing the human facial expressions in multi-frequencies. The prefrontal-temporal pathway might be related to the altered negative emotional modulation in migraine. These findings suggested that migraine might be characterized by more universal altered cerebral processing of negative stimuli. Since the significant result in this study was frequency-specific, more independent replicative studies are needed to confirm these results, and to elucidate the neurocircuitry underlying the association between migraine and emotional conditions.

Emotional stimulation processing characteristics in depression: Meta-analysis of eye tracking findings.

Objective: To systematically evaluate the attentional bias in patients with depression toward emotional stimuli and to explore eye movement indicators and potential regulatory variables that can distinguish such patients from healthy individuals. Methods: Case-control studies regarding eye-tracking in major depressive disorder published in PubMed, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, The Cochrane Library, EBSCOhost, Embase, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, and VIP databases from database initiation until March 12, 2022 were included in the present meta-analysis. Two researchers independently screened the literature and performed data extraction. The quality of the literature was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa quality assessment scale.RevMan 5.4 software was used for Meta-analysis. Results: Overall, 14 studies were included, including 1,167 participants (N depression = 474; N healthy = 693). We found that (1) fixation duration was significantly lower for positive emotional stimuli in the depression group than that in the healthy group; however, for negative stimuli, the fixation duration was significantly more in the depression group than in the healthy group. No significant difference was observed in terms of neutral emotional stimuli between groups. (2) Patients with depression exhibited a significantly lower fixation count for positive emotional stimuli than healthy individuals, whereas the fixation count for negative emotional stimuli was significantly higher in the depression group than in the healthy group. No significant difference was found for neutral emotional stimuli between groups. (3) No significant difference was detected in terms of the first fixation duration of the positive, negative, and neutral emotional stimuli between groups. (4) subgroup analysis indicated that age effected fixation duration for positive emotional stimuli. In addition, age and the type of negative emotional picture (sad, dysphoric, threat, anger) effected fixation duration for negative emotional stimuli. Conclusion: Our research supports that patients with depression exhibit a negative attention bias toward emotional stimuli, and the fixation duration and fixation counts may be used as auxiliary objective indicators for depression screening.

Sensory processing sensitivity predicts performance in an emotional antisaccade paradigm.

Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) is a common, heritable, and evolutionarily conserved trait, describing inter-individual differences in responsiveness and a more cautious approach to novel stimuli. It is associated with increased activation of brain regions involved in awareness, integration of sensory information, and empathy during processing of emotional faces. Furthermore, SPS is related to better performance in a visual detection task. Even though SPS is conceptualized to be closely related to traits characterized by pausing before acting, no study to date has assessed the relation between SPS and inhibitory control in a behavioral inhibition task. The present study fills this gap by investigating how SPS influences individual performance on two different antisaccade paradigms including emotional face stimuli. In addition, we assessed self-reported mood, anxiety, and depressiveness. Results showed that SPS was related to faster processing speed on the emotional, but not the classic antisaccade paradigm. Moreover, SPS predicted inhibitory control speed above mood and depressiveness. Our results provide evidence that higher SPS participants show superior inhibitory abilities, especially during the processing of emotional stimuli. This is in line with earlier findings showing better performance in a visual detection task as well as increased brain activation during emotional face processing.

Eye movement pattern of attention bias to emotional stimuli in women with high premenstrual symptoms.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) refers to a group of symptoms linked to the menstrual cycle. Women with PMS have cognitive mode of rumination, which leads to their attention bias to emotional stimuli. This study investigated the biases for emotional information in women with high premenstrual symptoms (HPMS) compared with women with low premenstrual symptoms (LPMS). METHODS: A total of 38 women with HPMS and 44 women with LPMS completed self-report questionnaires and a free viewing task with eye-tracking technology. RESULTS: The questionnaire results indicate that women in the HPMS group had higher levels of rumination than those in the LPMS group. The eye-tracking results show that women in the HPMS group had an orientation bias towards negative emotional stimuli in the early cognitive process. In the late cognitive process, women in the HPMS group had accelerated attentional disengagement to positive emotional stimuli and difficult attentional disengagement to negative emotional stimuli. Further correlation analysis revealed positive relationships between the scores of initial fixation latency bias of positive pictures in premenstrual phase and the scores of symptom rumination in both groups and between the scores of initial fixation latency bias of positive pictures in premenstrual phase and the scores of brooding in HPMS group. LIMITATIONS: This study used a retrospective questionnaire to assess the symptoms of PMS. CONCLUSIONS: Women with HPMS had impaired attentional engagement and disengagement to emotional stimuli compared with women with LPMS, and it may be related to their cognitive mode of rumination.

The Impact of Emotion and Sex on Fabrication and False Memory Formation.

The aim of the present study was to examine how negative emotion and sex affect self-generated errors as in fabrication set-up and later false recognition of those errors. In total, 120 university students volunteered to take part in the study. Participants were assigned at random into two equal sized groups (N = 60) depending on the type of event they received (negative emotional or neutral). We expected that fabrication and false recognition would be enhanced for the emotional event compared to the neutral one. We further hypothesized that both the willingness to fabricate and later false recognition would be enhanced for women compared with men. The results partly confirmed the hypotheses. The results showed that emotional valence (negative) affects both the willingness to fabricate about events that never took place, and the recognition of the fabrication as true at a later point. Women and men were equally likely to fabricate but women were more likely to recognize their fabrication, particularly for the emotional event. The results are discussed in the context of prior work.

Frozen in (e)motion: How reactive motor inhibition is influenced by the emotional content of stimuli in healthy and psychiatric populations.

Efficient inhibitory control is vital. However, environmental cues can influence motor control especially in an emotional context. One common task to measure inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which asks participants to respond to go stimuli knowing that on some trials a stop signal will be presented, requiring them to inhibit their response. This paradigm estimates the ability to inhibit already-initiated responses by calculating participants' stop-signal reaction times (SSRT), an index of inhibitory control. Here, we aim to review the existing, often contradictory, evidence on the influence of emotional stimuli on the inhibitory process. We aim to discuss which factors may reveal an interference as well as an advantage of emotional stimuli on action inhibition performance. Finally, we review the existing evidence that has investigated the effect of such stimuli on action inhibition in the psychiatric population. Important factors are the relevance, the intensity and the valence of the emotional stimulus, as well as the affected component of the motor control. From all this evidence, it is clear that understand precisely how emotion is integrated into core executive functions, such as inhibitory control, is essential not only for cognitive neuroscience, but also for refining neurocognitive models of psychopathology.

The Effect of Empathy on the Attentional Processing of Painful and Emotional Stimuli.

BACKGROUND: Empathy is shown to affect the attentional processing of painful stimuli and emotional stimuli. However, whether the attentional effects on emotional stimuli depend on emotional valence and the nature of the relationship between the attentional effects on different stimuli are still unknown. METHODS: In the present study, 25 high-empathy (HE) participants and 25 low-empathy (LE) participants were recruited to perform dot-probe tasks on painful stimuli and emotional stimuli. RESULTS: The results showed that HE individuals had weak attentional disengagement to painful pictures. More importantly, regarding emotional pictures, HE individuals showed attentional avoidance to negative emotion pictures, while LE individuals showed attentional bias to positive emotion pictures. Correlation analysis showed that the attentional bias score and attentional disengagement score were only associated with each other within the same category of stimuli (painful, positive or negative stimuli). CONCLUSION: These results revealed that HE individuals mainly showed attentional avoidance to negative stimuli, while LE individuals mainly showed attentional bias to positive stimuli.

Increased theta/alpha synchrony in the habenula-prefrontal network with negative emotional stimuli in human patients.

Lateral habenula is believed to encode negative motivational stimuli and plays key roles in the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders. However, how habenula activities are modulated during the processing of emotional information is still poorly understood. We recorded local field potentials from bilateral habenula areas with simultaneous cortical magnetoencephalography in nine patients with psychiatric disorders during an emotional picture-viewing task. Transient activity in the theta/alpha band (5-10 Hz) within the habenula and prefrontal cortical regions, as well as the coupling between these structures, is increased during the perception and processing of negative emotional stimuli compared to positive emotional stimuli. The increase in theta/alpha band synchronization in the frontal cortex-habenula network correlated with the emotional valence but not the arousal score of the stimuli. These results provide direct evidence for increased theta/alpha synchrony within the habenula area and prefrontal cortex-habenula network in the perception of negative emotion in human participants.

Functional brain network topology across the menstrual cycle is estradiol dependent and correlates with individual well-being.

The menstrual cycle (MC) is a sex hormone-related phenomenon that repeats itself cyclically during the woman's reproductive life. In this explorative study, we hypothesized that coordinated variations of multiple sex hormones may affect the large-scale organization of the brain functional network and that, in turn, such changes might have psychological correlates, even in the absence of overt clinical signs of anxiety and/or depression. To test our hypothesis, we investigated longitudinally, across the MC, the relationship between the sex hormones and both brain network and psychological changes. We enrolled 24 naturally cycling women and, at the early-follicular, peri-ovulatory, and mid-luteal phases of the MC, we performed: (a) sex hormone dosage, (b) magnetoencephalography recording to study the brain network topology, and (c) psychological questionnaires to quantify anxiety, depression, self-esteem, and well-being. We showed that during the peri-ovulatory phase, in the alpha band, the leaf fraction and the tree hierarchy of the brain network were reduced, while the betweenness centrality (BC) of the right posterior cingulate gyrus (rPCG) was increased. Furthermore, the increase in BC was predicted by estradiol levels. Moreover, during the luteal phase, the variation of estradiol correlated positively with the variations of both the topological change and environmental mastery dimension of the well-being test, which, in turn, was related to the increase in the BC of rPCG. Our results highlight the effects of sex hormones on the large-scale brain network organization as well as on their possible relationship with the psychological state across the MC. Moreover, the fact that physiological changes in the brain topology occur throughout the MC has widespread implications for neuroimaging studies.

Examining the effect of stress induction on auditory working memory performance for emotional and non-emotional stimuli in female students.

BACKGROUND: Theoretical frameworks have shown that stress might influence working memory in different ways. Previous research has investigated the effect of stress on female's working memory but there is lack of evidence regarding the impact of emotional aspects. OBJECTIVES: This study examined the effect of stress induction on auditory working memory (AWM) performance among university students for emotional (positive and negative) and non-emotional (neutral) stimuli. METHODS: A sample of 102 female students at the Universities of Isfahan, Iran was selected using convenience sampling in 2018. Participants completed the demographic information sheets, then, they were randomly assigned into the experimental and control groups. The stress was induced by the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test (SECPT). An n-back task was presented pre and post of stress induction, to evaluate the AWM performance (accuracy and reaction time). The research data were analyzed using mixed-model ANOVA. RESULTS: Both accuracy and reaction time (RT) scores were found to be enhanced for positive words in the experimental condition. However, accuracy and RT indices were found to be worsening for negative words in the experimental condition. CONCLUSIONS: This study supports the idea that stress influences AWM performance depend on emotionally-valenced stimuli, which may help us to better understand the underlying mechanisms of memory processing.