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Regulating working memory In emotionally-laden contexts

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Individual differences in working memory capacity partly arise from variability in attention control, a process influenced by negative emotional content. Thus, individual differences in working memory capacity should be predictive of differences in the ability to regulate attention in emotional contexts. To address this hypothesis, a complex-span working memory task…

Individual differences in working memory capacity partly arise from variability in attention control, a process influenced by negative emotional content. Thus, individual differences in working memory capacity should be predictive of differences in the ability to regulate attention in emotional contexts. To address this hypothesis, a complex-span working memory task (symmetry span) was modified so that negative arousing images or neutral images subtended the background during the encoding phase. Across three experiments, negative arousing images impaired working memory encoding relative to neutral images, resulting in impoverished symmetry span scores. Additionally, in Experiment 3, both negative and arousing images captured attention and led to increased hit rates in a subsequent recognition task. Contrary to the primary hypothesis, individual differences in working memory capacity derived from three complex span tasks failed to moderate the effect of negative arousing images on working memory encoding across two large scale studies. Implications for theories of working memory and attention control in emotional contexts will be discussed.
ContributorsWingert, Kimberly Marie (Author) / Brewer, Gene A. (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric (Committee member) / Killeen, Peter (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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The Gleam-Glum Effect with Pseudo-Words: /i/ vs /Λ/ Phonemes Carry Emotional Valence that Influences Semantic Interpretation

Description
I recently established the gleam-glum effect confirming in both English and Mandarin that words with the /i/ vowel-sound (like “gleam”) are rated more emotionally positive than matched words with the /ʌ/ vowel-sound (like “glum”). Here I confirm that these vowel sounds also influence the semantic perception of monosyllabic pseudo-words.…

I recently established the gleam-glum effect confirming in both English and Mandarin that words with the /i/ vowel-sound (like “gleam”) are rated more emotionally positive than matched words with the /ʌ/ vowel-sound (like “glum”). Here I confirm that these vowel sounds also influence the semantic perception of monosyllabic pseudo-words. In Experiment 1, 100 participants rated 50 individual /i/ monosyllabic pseudo-words (like “zeech”) as significantly more positive than 50 matched /ʌ/ pseudo-words (like “zuch”), replicating my previous findings with real words. Experiment 2 assessed the gleam-glum effect on pseudo-words using a forced-choice task. Participants (n = 148) were presented with the 50 pairs of pseudo-words used in Experiment 1 and tasked to guess the most likely meaning of each pseudo-word by matching them with one of two meaning words that were either extremely positive or extremely negative in affective valence (Warriner et al., 2013). I found a remarkably robust effect in which every one of the 50 pseudo-word pairs was on average more likely to have the /i/ word matched with the positive meaning word and /ʌ/ word with the negative one (exact binomial test, p < .001, z = 7.94). The findings confirm that the gleam-glum effect facilitates bootstrapping meaning of words from their pronunciations. These findings coupled with previous real word findings (Yu et al., in press), showing not only that the effect encompasses the entire English lexicon but can also be explained with an embodied facial musculature mechanism, is consistent with the idea that sound symbolism may shape vocabulary use of a language over time by influencing semantic perception.
ContributorsYu, Shin-Phing (Author) / McBeath, Michael K. (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Thesis advisor, Committee member) / Stone, Gregory (Committee member) / Benitez, Viridiana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021