Attentional Load Effects on Emotional Content in Face Working Memory

This study investigated the role of attentional resources in processing emotional faces on working memory (WM). Participants memorised two face arrays with the same emotion but different identities and were required to judge whether the test face had the same identity as one of the previous faces. Concurrently during encoding and maintenance, a sequence of high-or-low pitched tones (high load) or white noise bursts (low load) was presented, and participants were required to count how many low-tones were heard. Experiment 1 and 2 used an emotional and neutral test face, respectively. The results revealed a significant WM impairment for sad and angry faces in the high load vs low load condition but not for happy faces. Happy faces were better recognised than other emotional faces in a high load. In Experiment 1, participants remembered better happy faces than other emotional faces. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that performance was poorer for happy than sad faces but not for angry faces. This evidence suggests that depleting of attentional resources affects less WM for happy faces than other emotional faces, but also differential effects on WM for emotional faces depend on the presence or absence of emotion face at retrieval.