Design
The current experiment employed repeated measures design. The experiment design was 3 (Level of distraction: control, low, or high) × 3 (Emotional face: neutral, happy, or sad). The dependent variable was WM performance, partial span score for the serial recall of emotional faces, on the modified Aospan. The partial span score is the WM span for serial recall of emotional faces. For example, if an individual recalled correctly 2 emotional faces in a set size of 3, 6 emotional faces in a set size of 6, the partial span scores would be 2 and 6 respectively. The partial span score has more variance and thus allows for better discrimination between high and low ability participants (Unsworth et al., 2005).