Extending Brain-Training to the Affective Domain: Increasing Cognitive and Affective Executive Control through Emotional Working Memory Training

PLOS ONE, September 2011

21949712

Susanne Schweizer, Adam Hampshire, Tim Dalgleish

So-called 'brain-training' programs are a huge commercial success. However, empirical evidence regarding their effectiveness and generalizability remains equivocal. This study investigated whether brain-training (working memory [WM] training) improves cognitive functions beyond the training task (transfer effects), especially regarding the control of emotional material since it constitutes much of the information we process daily. Forty-five participants received WM training using either emotional or neutral material, or an undemanding control task. WM training, regardless of training material, led to transfer gains on another WM task and in fluid intelligence. However, only brain-training with emotional material yielded transferable gains to improved control over affective information on an emotional Stroop task. The data support the reality of transferable benefits of demanding WM training and suggest that transferable gains across to affective contexts require training with material congruent to those contexts. These findings constitute preliminary evidence that intensive cognitively demanding brain-training can improve not only our abstract problem-solving capacity, but also ameliorate cognitive control processes (e.g. decision-making) in our daily emotive environments.