Relationship between Memory Bias and Anxiety, Investigated Using the Directed Forgetting Experimental Paradigm

Background. Information processing models propose that anxious individuals are characterizedby memory biases for mood-congruent threat information. Studies of memory bias show thatadults with anxiety disorders, like posttraumatic stress disorder (Becker, Rinck, & Margraf,1994), trauma histories (Geraerts & McNally, 2008) and high anxiety sensitivity (McCabe, 1999),exhibit stronger memory biases toward negative information than non-anxious controls. A recentstudy has also found that socially anxious individuals lacked the memory bias for positive socialinformation displayed by their non-anxious counterparts (Liang, Hsu, Hung, Wang, & Lin, 2011).The inability to forget negative material has been proposed as a risk or maintenance factor foranxiety disorders. The ability to retrieve positive memories is thought to serve as a protectivefactor against anxiety symptomology. Purposes. (1) Most studies of memory bias have not foundan explicit memory bias for negative information in anxious individuals. Equivalent memoryperformance for positive or neutral stimuli has been observed in both anxious and non-anxiouspopulations. The relationships between positive memory bias, negative memory bias, and anxietyvulnerability must be clarified. Directed forgetting (DF) is a paradigm to study memory biases.We will investigate how DF for negative or positive items differs between anxiety and non-anxiety-prone individuals. This may help our understanding of memory bias for emotionalvalence events in anxiety populations. (2) The developmental literature has revealed difficultieswith intentional forgetting in typically developing children. However, studies of memory biasesin anxiety-prone child and adolescent populations have been limited and inconclusive. Thisproposed study will examine memory bias in anxiety-prone teenagers and children by comparingtheir DF performance to that of non-anxiety-prone controls. Methodology and Hypotheses. Wewill recruit 120 children aged 12-15 years from the community. A self-reporting questionnairewill be administered to measure anxiety symptoms and other psychological constructs (e.g.,depression). A computer-based, DF item-method memory test, consisting of previously validatedChinese words of three valence types, threat-related words, positive words, and neutral words,will be used. Half of the words from each list will be assigned to either a to-be-remembered(TBR) condition or a to-be-forgotten condition (TBF). The participants will be shown each ofthese words and its condition. They will then be given a recognition task, in which they will beshown all of the words from the list and asked to indicate whether each had appeared in theprevious task, regardless of the assigned TBR/TBF cue. Based on earlier research findings, wehypothesize that anxious adolescents will exhibit a small to insignificant DF effect, whereas non-anxiousadolescents will exhibit an adult-like DF effect. We predict that anxiety-proneparticipants will demonstrate a lower DF effect for negative information than control participants:anxious individuals will find it more difficult to forget negative items. We further predict thatthey will demonstrate a larger DF effect for positive information: anxious individuals will find iteasier to forget positive items. Contributions. This proposed project will extend our existingresearch on cognitive information processing in anxiety and on community treatments based oncognitive bias modifications by including memory bias in anxiety vulnerability and extending ourstudy to children. If anxious-prone children have difficulty in remembering positive events,cognitive trainings to enhance retrieval and recall of positive events could reduce vulnerability toanxiety among them.