The Impact of Negative Emotion on Visual Working Memory Under Excessive Cognitive Load: The Role of the Resource-Allocation Stage and Location Information

Visual working memory (VWM) enables people to temporarily store important information for use in subsequent tasks. Previous studies have indicated that a negative emotional state can influence the processing of VWM; however, the direction of this influence and its underlying cognitive mechanisms remain contentious. The present study investigated the impact of negative emotion on VWM, with a particular focus on how this association was manifested across cognitive-load conditions, theoretically defined resource-allocation stages, and location-information conditions. Across two experiments, negative emotion was found to exert a bidirectional effect: it impaired VWM performance under low cognitive load, whereas it produced a facilitative effect under excessive cognitive load. Importantly, this facilitative effect emerged only during the early stage of resource allocation and when the locations of memory items and probe items were congruent. Under these specific conditions, negative emotion increased VWM capacity (K = 3.86, SE = 0.23) compared with the neutral condition (K = 3.32, SE = 0.22), whereas this facilitative effect disappeared when location congruence was disrupted. These findings demonstrate that the effects of negative emotion on VWM depend on the interaction between emotional states, cognitive load, and location-information availability. This provides important evidence for understanding the boundary conditions under which emotion modulates cognitive function, and offers theoretical guidance for load-sensitive and emotion-aware cognitive system design in complex information-processing environments.