Reduced recollective memory about negative items in high trait anxiety individuals: An ERP study

The present study investigated whether trait anxiety reduce the contribution of episodic retrieval to recognizing negative words. Behavioral and electrophysiological responses in anxious individuals were measured during an exclusion recognition task to compare with a previous report about control participants (Inaba et al., 2007). At test, participants were asked to respond “old” when an item had been included in a target study list. According to the process-dissociation framework, the difference in the waveforms for the “old” responses between target and non-target items is considered to be a measurement of recollection. It was shown to be the difference in the slow waves. As with the behavioral estimate of recollection, the difference in the slow waves at left-parietal area was smaller for negative items compared to other items in the anxiety group. This result was in contrast to a greater difference in the slow positivity for negative words in the control group. These findings suggest that excess old judgments for negative items in the anxious group might be associated with less recollective memory.