The Effect of Induced Stress on the Number of Mistakes in Visual Working Memory for Emotional & None Emotional Stimuli

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effect of induced stress on the number of students’ visual working memory mistakes for emotional & none motional stimuli. This experimental study used a post-test with control group design. 60 students were selected through available sampling and randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. Through Socially Evaluated Cold-Pressor Test, stress was induced and perceived stress was measured by using a scale consisted of 100 points and then the level of Physiological signs of participants were checked. Afterward, an n-back task (Kirchner, 1958) was used to evaluate the visual working memory. Finally, the participants’ mental attempts were evaluated by another scale (Zijlstra, 1993). Each participant, through a between groups design, completed different stages of the study. Mixed-model ANOVA and Paired t-test were used to analyze the data. According to the results, the number of omission errors in emotional stimuli were significantly more than none emotional stimuli, in which negative stimuli (P=0.01) were wrongly selected more than positive ones significantly (P=0.001). Also, males (M=10) made more omission mistakes than females (M=9.23). It seems that the function of visual working memory under stress is not as normal condition, especially for negative stimuli. Generally, by impairing the function of visual working memory, stress increases the rate of mistakes in remembering the presented stimulus.