Effects of emotional faces on working memory in adolescents with learning anxiety

Previous studies on working memory processing characteristics of anxious people have focused more on effects of trait than state anxiety, especially the processing characteristics of working memory under emotional faces. Learning anxiety not only affects teenagers’ learning but also their life and overall personality development. This is the first study to examine adolescents with learning anxiety and explore effects of different negative emotional faces on working memory. Adolescents with learning anxiety (n = 30) and typically developing (n = 30) adolescents completed the emotional 2-back task with both facial emotion and gender as target stimulus. When facial emotion was the target stimulus, the two groups were asked to remember facial emotions (anger, sadness, and neutral). When facial gender was the target and facial emotion was the background stimulus, the two groups remembered the facial gender. Working memory performance in the learning anxiety group was worse than in the typically developing group. When facial emotion was the target stimulus, angry and sad faces significantly interfered with working memory performance in the learning anxiety group. When facial gender was the target stimulus and facial emotion was the background stimulus, the interference effect of negative emotion was greater and the accuracy was lower in the learning anxiety group. Therefore, different from the biased effect of trait anxiety on negative emotions, negative emotions (anger and sadness) interfere with the working memory of adolescents in the learning anxiety group. This interference exists regardless of whether negative emotions are the target or background. This result suggests recommendations for educational practices. That is, the interference from negative emotions on students should be avoided, especially those with learning anxiety.