Anxiety and attentional control: identifying the nature and extent of anxiety-related working memory difficulties in young people

This study builds on previous work to investigate the nature and extent of anxiety-related working memory difficulties in young people. Anxiety is understood to diminish top-down control of attention. As such, anxious individuals exhibit greater susceptibility to distraction and reduced flexibility in allocating attention to task-relevant stimuli. While working memory plays a key explanatory role in models of anxiety, mixed empirical findings highlight the need for a more nuanced account of the relationship between anxiety, attentional control and working memory. Anxious psychopathology typically emerges in adolescence. Clarifying the role working memory processes play in the onset and maintenance of anxiety symptoms has important implications for both theory and intervention. The aim of this study is to investigate the interplay between anxiety and attentional control in shaping young people’s working memory performance and in particular, their susceptibility to distraction. A key objective is to identify the nature of any anxiety-related attentional control difficulties in this age group and to relate these to particular working memory processes (e.g., encoding, maintenance) and outcomes (e.g., speed of processing, recall accuracy). 200 participants (aged 18 - 24 years) will be recruited via Prolific and through the University of Bristol's Experimental Hours scheme. The main experimental task is an integrated complex span task. Under conditions of varying attentional demand, lists of to-be-remembered items (4, 6, 8 words) must be categorised and stored for later recall. Two further tasks split the integrated task into its component parts – simple span and processing - and these are performed under the same attentional manipulation. Participants will also complete self-report measures of attentional control difficulties and trait- and state-anxiety.