Individual Differences in Anxiety Influence Verbal Memory Accuracy and Confidence

We examined the influence of encoding duration in high- and low-anxious undergraduates on memory accuracy and confidence. Participants encoded words for 750 or 4,000 ms, and later made recognition and confidence judgments in their memory for targets and lures. The high-anxious had poorer memory accuracy than the low-anxious group, and endorsed lower confidence specifically for correct memory responses. There was no differential effect of encoding time across groups, though longer encoding time benefited both accuracy and confidence. As accuracy increased so did confidence in the low-anxious group, indicating higher resolution and Gamma correlations for meta-memory judgments, though this was not the case for high-anxious individuals. Results indicate that people with high levels of anxiety have unrealistically low confidence in their memories as their confidence was a poor predictor of accuracy and allowing additional encoding time does not alleviate this effect.