Working Memory Training in Relation to Anxiety, Stress, and Motivation
- PDF / 501,907 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 91 Downloads / 205 Views
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Working Memory Training in Relation to Anxiety, Stress, and Motivation Berna A. Sari 1
&
Güliz Zeynep Tarman 2,3 & Busra Ozdogan 3 & Baris Metin 3 & Nazanin Derakshan 4
Received: 7 January 2020 / Accepted: 13 May 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Interventions for improving working memory (WM) can be used to reduce anxiety-related symptoms. Here, we examine how WM training can impact trait anxiety and test anxiety for upcoming examinations, and the role of motivation and the sustainability of training effects were also examined. Volunteers were randomly assigned either to control (non-adaptive dual 1-back training, N = 52) or training group (adaptive dual n-back training, N = 49), who trained for 14 consecutive days right before the midterm exams week. Participants completed measures of trait anxiety, test anxiety, and attentional control before and after the intervention and at follow-up times (1 week and 7 weeks). Participants rated how motivated and accomplished they felt after each daily training session. They also rated their perceived performance success and confidence during the exam week at first followup session. Results found that adaptive training compared with the non-adaptive control training resulted in reductions in trait anxiety across time. Additionally, exploratory analyses showed that perceived success in the training task was associated with pre-to-post-intervention reductions in test anxiety. Our findings suggest that WM training has the potential to reduce anxiety and test anxiety-related symptoms under stress and emphasize the role of perceived success. Keywords Working memory training . Trait anxiety . Test anxiety . Stress . Motivation
Introduction Anxiety is defined as a negative emotional state characterized by apprehension and worry in response to perceived threat. It is commonly associated with impairments in working memory (WM; see Moran 2016, for a review), a supervisory brain system that plays an immensely important role in every day, as well as, in challenging situations and managing complex cognitive tasks (Baddeley 1992). Hence, intervention techniques aimed at improving WM can potentially decrease anxiety-related symptoms and improve life quality in anxious individuals. Accumulating research is showing that cognitive training
* Berna A. Sari [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey
2
Clinical Psychology Department, Institute of Health Sciences, Istanbul, Turkey
3
Department of Psychology, Uskudar University, Istanbul, Turkey
4
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London, London, UK
targeted at improving WM can be associated with reduced trait anxiety (in adults, Sari et al. 2016), reduced worry (Course-Choi et al. 2017; Hotton et al. 2018) and improved symptoms in patients with anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (Larsen et al. 2019). Recently, WM training using the adaptive dual n-back task was shown to result in sustainable reductions in
Data Loading...
