ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. ADHD
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1536942
This article is part of the Research TopicADHD and Anxiety: Causality Sequences Through a Biopsychosocial ModelView all 11 articles
Associations between Anxiety and Working Memory Components in Clinically Evaluated Children With and Without ADHD
Provisionally accepted
Carolyn L. Marsh*
Fatou GayeEnrique Cibrian
Sooyun ChoMiho O. Tatsuki
Julia ObiMeaghan E. Geren
Sherelle L HarmonMichael J. Kofler- Florida State University, Tallahassee, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Theoretical models describe working memory difficulties as risk factors and/or outcomes of anxiety in children, but the current evidence base is surprisingly mixed. Understanding the nature of the working memory/anxiety relation is complicated by the multi-component nature of each of these constructs. Consideration of the co-occurrence of anxiety with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is also imperative given that ADHD is associated with large magnitutude working memory impairments. The current study addressed these considerations using bifactor modeling to evaluate associations between latent estimates of working memory and anxiety subcomponents. The carefully-phenotyped sample included N=340 children between the ages of 8 and 13 (M = 10.31, SD = 1.39; 144 female participants), with an oversampling of children with ADHD (n=197). Results showed that domain-general anxiety was associated with worse phonological short-term memory (r = -.22, p = .01), but not central executive working memory or visuospatial short-term memory. Domain-specific anxiety factors (cognitive worry, physiological arousal) did not uniquely predict any of the short-term/working memory components. Further, multigroup analysis indicated that the magnitude and significance of these relations were comparable for both children with and without ADHD. Our findings did not support unique relations between domain-specific cognitive worry/physiological arousal and instead implicated domain-general common anxiety in difficulties with phonological short-term memory. Further research will be needed to replicate findings using this approach across additional measures and performance metrics, while continuing to account for the high co-occurrence between anxiety and ADHD.
Keywords: working memory, Anxiety, ADHD, worry, anxious arousal
Received: 29 Nov 2024; Accepted: 06 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Marsh, Gaye, Cibrian, Cho, Tatsuki, Obi, Geren, Harmon and Kofler. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Carolyn L. Marsh, Florida State University, Tallahassee, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.