Memory and Anxiety

Memory and Anxiety

1. Clinical Anxiety: vigilant monitoring of environment for potentially threatening events

   • Active efforts to avoid and reduce impact of these events
     • Diagnosis is important
       • PD: Recurrent periods of intense fear and palpitations. Worry about future attacks.
       • Social Phobia: intense unpleasant arousal in social situations, anticipatory anxiety and post hoc rumination
       • GAD: excessive and uncontrollable worry, physical fatigue and muscle tension
       • OCD: Persistent thoughts, impulses that are intrusive plus obsessions to reduce anxiety
       • PTSD: Feelings of fear following an event, efforts to avoid plus intrusive memories
         • Memory feeds these disorders

2. Need to consider ethics, nature of task, type of retrieval, nature of stimuli

   • There is greater heterogeneity in anxiety than depression
     • Important to study memory biases in anxiety as both Becks and Bower predict enhanced memory for anxiety related information = hyperaccessibility of threatening info
   • Medication and co-morbidity - which disorder was diagnosed first?

3. Matthews et al; Implicit and Explicit Mem Bias in Anxiety

   • Implicit memory involves both activation and integration, is relatively automatic and influences accessibility
     • There is evidence for attentional bias - irrelevant threatening info interferes with performance on colour naming/probe tasks
   • Used word completion (implicit) and cued recall (explicit) to measure recall in anxious pps
   • Low magnitude correlation between trait anxiety and selective recall of threatening wordsbut not in clinically anxious subjects
     • Indices of bias for emotional material derived from the two types of memory are independent of one another
       • In anxious subjects, threatening representations are better integrated into memory
         • Not sure if this is an enduring feature of anxiety versus a transient effect of mood
           • MCM might be obscured by functional avoidance strategies
             • Explicit tasks are more vulnerable to this
           • The ready activation of threatening reps might underlie intrusive thoughts of danger --> characterise anxiety states
         • internal representations of nonthreatening words were more strongly activated by priming than were those of threatening words.
     • On the implicit memory measure, clinically anxious subjects produced more threat word completions, but only from a set to which they had recently been exposed

4. Amir and Bomyea; Working Memory Capacity in Social Phobia

   • SPhobics have biased cog processes that exacerbate and maintain their symptoms
   • A deficit in executive functioning could lead to issues in social decoding in everyday situations
     • Leading to incorrect evaluations of social cues
     • People with social phobia have poor attentional control --> they experience recurrent, intrusive cognitions, even after the event
       • Evaluate WMC performance by completing an OSPAN task
         • People with SP differ from non-anxious in their WMC performance when processing stimuli with different valences
           • Worse WMC performance for neutral words and same WMC for social threat words
             • They were particularly salient
               • processing these words requires less attentional resources and less control needed
                 • actively storing and manipulating threat words = less challenging than neutral words
             • Possible mechanisms: Concurrent processes such as worry and rumination can consume WM resources and negatively affect performance
               • Threat stimuli is retained more efficiently --> affecting LTM and attention --> maintenance of SP
                 • Need programs designed to train WM for non-threat info

5. Exner, Martin and Rief; OCD and Memory

   • People with OCD act as if they don't trust their memory - constantly checking
     • They show deficits on neuropsychological tests of memory and learning
     • OCD pps are differentially impaired across different memory domains
       • Visual spatial ep mem inconsistencies --> impaired executive function
         • Checking and rumination sig related to ep mem performance even when depression controlled for
           • Rumination exerts more influence than depression
             • OCD deficit is 'real' as neither depression, rumination or trait anxiety could fully explain results
   • Previous research 1) only assessed one aspect of memory
     • 2) How do deficits in learning and memory relate to psychopathological symptoms of OCD?
       • 3) Don't control for depressive symptoms which can also compromise functioning
       • Current study limitations: Need longitudinal study, no cause and effect, only used neutral content and small sample size

6. Zlomuzica et al; Episodic memory in Anxiety

   • Cog theories of anxiety; neg beliefs and avoidance are the result of misinterpretation of internal and external stimuli
     • Anxious people tend to selectively retrieve personally relevant info that confirms neg interpretation of self
       • Learning Theories; Need to analyse personally relevant memories to reveal fear conditioning events
         • We need to incorporate valid paradigms to assess ep mem in anxiety as complexity is not captured by verbal learning tests etc
           • Need to develop novel methods that help to understand, interpret and possibly actively use ep mem to alleviate symptoms
             • We also need more information on neural basis of ep mem in anxiety