A compensatory relationship between working and long-term memory for emotional faces

The negative correlation between WM and LTM emotional biases aligns with the arousal-biased competition model, suggesting that the cognitive resources allocated to maintaining threatening information in WM may come at the cost of elaborate encoding processes necessary for robust LTM consolidation. These results provide novel evidence for a compensatory processing mechanism wherein the cognitive system manages immediate and delayed memories of emotional faces in a complementary rather than cumulative fashion.