Emotion affects how we respond to events, how we think about them, and how we remember them. Researchers from a variety of domains have investigated these aspects of “emotional cognition.” What seems to have received less attention in the literature, however, are the effects of emotion on short-term, working memory. Many commonly held ideas (i.e., “I need to cool off before responding” or “I wasn’t thinking; I was caught up in the heat of the moment.”) suggest there is an effect of emotion on working memory. This dissertation will review key research on the storage (STM) and process (executive functions) components of working memory as well as research on emotion and attention. After the brief review, a two-part experiment will be described that investigated the characteristics of an affective working memory.

The study aimed at investigating individual differences in working memory capacity and their relationship to attention control. There is research suggesting that working memory measures actually reflect two aspects of attention control: the ability to maintain attention in the face of distraction, and the ability to maintain task set. The current investigation was intended to replicate these findings and explore how well these measures can predict performance on attention-intensive tasks that include emotional materials. Another aim of this investigation was to measure the impact that emotion has on working memory capacity. Can a measure of working memory that incorporates emotion predict attention control performance better than traditional working memory measures?

Results showed that overall, individual differences on the emotional measure of working memory capacity were a better predictor of performance (for both errors and latencies) on an Emotional Stroop task than the neutral measure whereas the neutral measure of working memory was a better predictor (for latencies) in the classic Stroop task (color-naming). This pattern of results would seem to support the construct of emotional working memory – that is, one's ability to maintain emotional words in working memory was specifically a better predictor of performance on other tasks involving emotion, while the ability to maintain neutral words was a better predictor of attention control in the classic Stroop task.