AUTHOR=Lukasik Karolina M. , Waris Otto , Soveri Anna , Lehtonen Minna , Laine Matti 

TITLE=The Relationship of Anxiety and Stress With Working Memory Performance in a Large Non-depressed Sample

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00004

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00004

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Clinical anxiety and acute stress caused by major life events have well-documented detrimental effects on cognitive processes, such as working memory (WM). However, less is known about the relationships of state anxiety or everyday stress with WM performance in non-clinical populations. We investigated the associations between these two factors and three WM composites (verbal WM, visuospatial WM, and n-back updating performance) in a large online sample of non-depressed US American adults. We found a trend for a negative association between WM performance and anxiety, but not with stress. Thus, WM performance appears rather robust against normal variation in anxiety and everyday stress.</p>