When Threat Comes from Within: First Evidence that Anticipatory Emotion Impairs Working Memory

Although anticipating threat is known to capture attentional resources, its direct impact on working memory (WM), a core cognitive function supporting everyday activities, has yet to be empirically examined. Given the close dependence of WM on attentional resources, it is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that anticipating threat disrupts WM performance. Moreover, since threat-related attentional bias increases with anxiety, WM disruption caused by anticipatory threat may likewise intensify with anxiety. In Experiment 1, we tested whether anticipating threat captures attentional resources and impairs WM, and whether these effects vary with anxiety. Experiment 2 replicated and extended this design under higher task demands. Participants performed a gamified complex-span task in which each trial occurred in a virtual room associated with the potential appearance of a proximal threat (a sudden screamer), a distal threat (loss of accumulated points), or a neutral condition. Importantly, no threat ever appeared, isolating purely anticipatory processes. Attentional capture was indexed by parity-judgment accuracy, and WM by serial recall. Across both experiments, threat anticipation produced attentional capture and impaired WM. In Experiment 1, attentional capture decreased as anxiety increased, whereas this compensatory pattern disappeared under higher task load in Experiment 2. In contrast, WM impairment increased with cognitive anxiety, particularly under distal threat. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that anticipating threat impairs WM, in line with recent models of emotion, anxiety, and WM.