Worrying Today Could Mean Worrying Tomorrow

Sept. 13, 2006 — -- Worrying too much about an unpleasant task you will face an hour down the road will burn that experience more deeply into your brain, making it much more difficult for you to forget how badly you blundered, according to new research.

And that memory of your failure could make it more difficult for you to face the same task later, thus sending you into a downward spiral of self-fulfilling prophecies.

The research, conducted by psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shows that simple anticipation of an emotional event, whether good or bad, will reinforce the memory of that event.

"That finding was a bit of a surprise to us," said Jack Nitschke, assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at the university, and a clinical psychologist.

It suggests that anticipating a bad situation may kick-start an "arousal or fear circuitry" in the brain, says Kristen Mackiewicz, lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mackiewicz has since moved on to the University of Colorado, where she is a doctoral candidate in psychology.

Nitschke and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging -- a scanner that allows researchers to study the effects of various stimuli on the human brain -- to see whether anticipation of an event had any impact on subsequent memories of that event.

Two areas of the brain, the amygdala and the hippocampus, both associated with memory, lit up when 36 student volunteers were shown a series of photographs, including photos of gruesome scenes.

The pictures were preceded by a symbol moments before each photo flashed on a monitor. The participants knew the symbol indicated the emotional nature of the pictures.

The symbols varied, depending on whether the upcoming photo was "neutral" or "aversive."

All of the photos came from an international repository established 20 years ago to provide psychologists with a standardized set of images that would have a predictable impact on viewers.