Presented paper deals with the effect of positive emotions
arousal on working memory performance. This subject is
interesting, among other things, because research in this area
comes to contradictory findings. Neuropsychological theory by
Ashby et al. (1999) proposes that positive emotions with lower
level of arousal facilitate working memory performance, whereas
positive emotions with higher level of arousal decrease this
performance. These assumptions were tested on a sample of 52
participants, who were randomly divided into 3 groups. In group
1, positive emotions with lower level of arousal were evoked,
in group 2 positive emotions with higher level of arousal were
evoked, and group 3 was a control group. Emotional states were
induced using presentation of images from database
International affective picture system (Lang et al., 2008),
which was followed by administration of working memory test,
the 2-back task. Whether emotional states induction was
successful, was verified by a questionnaire that participants
filled out immediately after testing. Results suggest that
targeted emotional states were not invoked. The analysis
further showed that there is no statistically significant
difference in working memory performance between the groups.