Emotional Working Memory Across the Visualization Spectrum

In 2015, the term “aphantasia” was coined to describe a small group of individuals who lack the ability to voluntarily produce visual mental imagery. This caused a rising interest in aphantasia and its associated neural, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional features. Understanding the role of visual mental imagery in both emotional and cognitive processes, it is reasonable to question whether aphantasia may result in importantly unique experiences that may require improved therapeutic practices to account for these differences. Previous studies have found that aphantasics experience reduced emotional responses to recalled emotional events, reduced affective processing, poor autobiographical memory, and other cognitive differences in a variety of domains. Notably, imagery plays a central role in emotional generation and regulation as well as memory. Almost all major therapeutic orientations include visual components, causing the aphantasic population to report reduced efficacy of psychotherapy and barriers to diagnosis and treatment. This study addresses a gap in the understanding of the connections between the emotional and cognitive realms of aphantasia by explaining the relationship between emotional working memory and visual mental imagery ability. In a controlled laboratory environment, consenting adult participants in Greeley, Colorado completed two surveys and an emotional memory task. The hypothesis was that those with lower visual mental imagery ability experienced emotional working memory deficits. Contrary to the hypothesis, no significant differences were found across groups in emotional memory performance, response time, or categorization of emotional stimuli. These results point to significant limitations in the current measurement of visual mental imagery.