ArticlePsychophysiology2016
Working memory maintenance is sufficient to reduce state anxiety.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT03027414 (The Effect of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to the Frontoparietal Attention Network on Anxiety Potentiated Startle), which is not on this map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
The Effect of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to the Frontoparietal Attention Network on Anxiety Potentiated Startle
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analytic evidence for downregulation of the amygdala during working memory maintenance.Human brain mapping · 2022Pooled it
- Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory Performance During the COHuman psychopharmacology · 2026Trial
- Methylphenidate modulates interactions of anxiety with cognition.Translational psychiatry · 2021Trial
- Mechanistic link between right prefrontal cortical activity and anxious arousal revealed using transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2020Trial
- The Philadelphia Theta Burst Project: A novel fMRI-guided electric field modeling dataset with reliability metrics.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Threat of shock increases distractor susceptibility during the short-term maintenance of visual information.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Interleaved TMS/fMRI shows that threat decreases dlPFC-mediated top-down regulation of emotion processing.NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience · 2024Article
- Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation to the Right Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex May Increase Potentiated Startle in Healthy Individuals.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2023Article
- Avoidance-motivational intensity modulated the effect of negative emotion on working memory.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The role of dlPFC laterality in the expression and regulation of anxiety.Neuropharmacology · 2023Review
- Neural resources shift under Methylphenidate: A computational approach to examine anxiety-cognition interplay.NeuroImage · 2022Article
- Recognition memory, primacy vs. recency effects, and time perception in the online version of the fear of scream paradigm.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Patients with anxiety disorders rely on bilateral dlPFC activation during verbal working memory.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
- A generalized workflow for conducting electric field-optimized, fMRI-guided, transcranial magnetic stimulation.Nature protocols · 2020Article
- Does overloading cognitive resources mimic the impact of anxiety on temporal cognition?Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2020Article
- Beginning of the Pandemic: COVID-19-Elicited Anxiety as a Predictor of Working Memory Performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Resting-state connectivity of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and the central nucleus of the amygdala in clinical anxietyJournal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2019Article
- Exercise modulates the interaction between cognition and anxiety in humans.Cognition & emotion · 2019Article
- Prefrontal Executive Control Rescues Risk for Anxiety Associated with High Threat and Low Reward Brain Function.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
According to the attentional control theory (ACT) proposed by Eysenck and colleagues, anxiety interferes with cognitive processing by prioritizing bottom-up attentional processes over top-down attentional processes, leading to competition for access to limited resources in working memory, particularly the central executive (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, ). However, previous research using the n-back working memory task suggests that working memory load also reduces state anxiety. Assuming that similar mechanisms underlie the effect of anxiety on cognition, and the effect of cognition on anxiety, one possible implication of the ACT would suggest that the reduction of state anxiety with increasing working memory load is driven by activation of central executive attentional control processes. We tested this hypothesis using the Sternberg working memory paradigm, where maintenance processes can be isolated from central executive processes (Altamura et al., ; Sternberg, ). Consistent with the n-back results, subjects showed decreased state anxiety during the maintenance period of high-load trials relative to low-load trials, suggesting that maintenance processes alone are sufficient to achieve this state anxiety reduction. Given that the Sternberg task does not require central executive engagement, these results are not consistent with an implication of the ACT where the cognition/anxiety relationship and anxiety/cognition relationship are mediated by similar central executive mechanisms. Instead, we propose an extension of the ACT such that engaging working memory maintenance suppresses state anxiety in a load-dependent manner. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the efficacy of this effect may moderate the effect of trait anxiety on cognition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.