The Relationship Among Working Memory Capacity, Cognitive Flexibility and Cognitive Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Accumulating evidence contributed to establishing an association between working memory capacity and the ability to remember, maintain attention, and inhibit irrelevant data while switching between tasks. It is a critical cognitive skill that is mainly associated with adaptive strategies, task-switching, decision-making, reasoning, and language learning. Additionally, cognitive emotion regulation strategies and cognitive flexibility have similar critical roles for completing a task, handling a problem, and regulating the emotions arising from mostly simply negative events or, conversely, from the ones stemming from traumatic events. The basis of cognitive emotion regulation is to regulate emotions as a way to handle problems, while cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to handle more than one task at the same time. Cognitive emotion regulation can sometimes be maladaptive, and the effort of individuals might be unavailing. However, once cognitive flexibility is adopted and developed, it is expected to be adaptive in solving problems at the cognitive level. This chapter explores reciprocal associations among executive functions by mainly focusing on working memory, cognitive emotion regulation and cognitive flexibility. Further studies are advised to be conducted between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and working memory capacity, as these findings may have significant implications for understanding the correlation between memory and emotion. Cognitive flexibility is also advised to be researched more in order to understand its role in cognitive processes.