The Capacity of emotional visual and verbal working memory in cancer patients with PTSD

Abstract

Introduction: Given that memory is one of the significant factors to perform everyday tasks, and any defect in it curbs the appropriate function and performance of an individual in his life; so that in order to emphasize the significance of memory and access to the details of this factor, the study in hand exhibits a comparison between patient group and control group in terms of verbal working memory and visual emotional one.
Methods: The evaluation of these two memories has been carried out by two visual emotional and verbal emotional tasks. In visual tasks, a picture of a woman’s face is used. In this task, first the picture of the woman was being exposed and then emotional, unemotional, and neutral pictures were being presented. And then the pictures of the woman which were shown before reappeared. Finally, the subjects were asked to recognize the changes in pictures with yes or no answers, and if the answer was yes, they had to identify the picture that had been changed. The verbal memory task was in a way that a sentence with a word was displayed for the patient, so that the patient had to both memorize the word and respond whether it is true or false by yes or no. After five word-sentence pairs, the individual had to remember the order of the memorized words. Individuals could get the full score if they remembered the true order of the words, and if they couldn’t fully remember, the proportion of the recalled words were calculated. In the current study, the participants were breast cancer patients.
Results and Discussion: Based on statistical analysis, research hypotheses were evaluated, so that significant differences were found between study groups in verbal emotional memory. But concerning visual emotional memory, no significant difference was found between the controls and the group without PTSD. The process of change in both types of memory was in such a way that the group with PTSD had the lowest level and there were no significant differences between the control group and the group without PTSD concerning visual emotional memory capacity.
Conclusion: From four existing hypothesis three hypothesis were confirmed but one was not confirmed