Out of fright, out of mind: impaired memory for information negated during looming threat.

People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. Because anxiety and stress can impair cognitive performance, we tested whether looming threat can similarly interfere with the process of updating representations of a statement's truthfulness. On each trial, participants saw a face paired with a personality descriptor.

Failures of executive function when at a height: Negative height-related appraisals are associated with poor executive function during a virtual height stressor.

It is difficult to maintain cognitive functioning in threatening contexts, even when it is imperative to do so. Research indicates that precarious situations can impair subsequent executive functioning, depending on whether they are appraised as threatening. Here, we used virtual reality to place participants at ground level or at a virtual height in order to examine the impact of a threat-related context on concurrent executive function and whether this relationship was modulated by negative appraisals of heights.

Proactive deprioritization of emotional distractors enhances target perception.

There are many situations in which it is important to focus on a task in the face of emotional distraction. Yet, emotional distractors can impair our ability to report items that appear soon after them, an effect known as emotion-induced blindness (EIB). To what degree does it help to know about emotional distractors ahead of time? Can we deprioritize emotional distractors when forewarned that they will appear? To address this question, we tested whether participants could overcome EIB when forewarned about the nature of an emotional distractor.