Trait-anxiety And Characteristics Of Cognitive Processing In Young Soldiers

Anxiety is one of the common emotional disorders among soldiers and also the preliminary stressful reaction of soldiers in war time. Trait-anxiety is one part of anxiety of soldiers and plays an important role in military tasks and mental health of soldiers. Previous researches of trait-anxiety mainly focused on the epidemic status, developmental characteristics and influential factors among normal and clinical samples. Some researches of cognitive processing also found the negative cognitive bias of trait-anxiety with stimulus such as emotion-words, face and affective pictures, etc. But those previous studies in soldier samples were poor not only in research methods and systematic analysis in the epidemic status, developmental characteristics and influential factors of trait-anxiety among soldiers, but also in the exploration of psychological mechanism of trait-anxiety, especially from the angle of cognitive processing. Therefore, it is of great significance to investigate the epidemic status, developmental characteristics, influential factors systematically and the cognitive processing characteristics of soldiers with trait-anxiety.This study, which employed young soldiers as participants, explored the correlations of trait-anxiety and personality, coping style, mental health and social support, probed into the epidemic characteristics of trait-anxiety in young soldiers using scales from the macroscopic and microcosmic angles. Subsequently, on the base of attention bias and memory bias of trait-anxiety, applying the classic cognitive paradigm of attention and memory, the cognitive processing characteristics of young soldiers with trait-anxiety were explored with the materials of IAPS from spatial processing, temporal course and shift of attention and recognition bias. The whole study, which included 8 researches, can be divided into four parts involving the exploration of epidemic status, developmental characteristics and influential factors of trait-anxiety in young soldiers; the application of IAPS to young soldiers; and the exploration of the cognitive processing characteristics of trait-anxiety in young soldiers including shift, spatial and temporal resource distribution of attention, recognition, etc. Summarizing all researches, the conclusions can be attained as follows:1. The prevalent rate of trait-anxiety in young soldiers is 70.7%, among which 39.2% is in low level, 23.5% in middle level, and 8.0% in high level, and there exist significant differences in sex, age, and service-age.2. The trait-anxiety level of young soldiers displays significant developmental features: (1) "upward-downward" trend in age; (2) "upward-downward-upward" trend in service age with two turning points in the second year (the highest) and the fifth year (the lowest) respectively; (3) significant difference in gender: "downward-upward" trend in age and "U" shape trend in service age among females, which is different from males; (4) significant difference in army services: the land force with a significantly higher level than the air force and the navy; and (5) significant difference in rank: officers with a significantly lower level than soldiers and non-commissioned officers.3. Personality, coping style, mental health and social support are important factors to affect the trait-anxiety in young soldiers. The order of factors with effects on trait-anxiety from high to low is immature coping, mature coping, neuroticism, mental health, introversion/extroversion, psychoticism and social support.4. IAPS can be employed universally. The scores of arousal and dominance in young soldiers are significantly lower than those of college students. IAPS can be used in cognitive experiments among young soldiers with the establishment of the score system.5. Negative cognitive processing bias is found in the spatial distribution of attention resource in young soldiers with trait-anxiety. Namely, there exist over-vigilance to negative stimulus during the early period of attention processing, avoidant tendency during the late period of attention processing, and poor accuracy in the early period.6. There is cognitive processing bias in the temporal distribution of attention resource in young soldiers with trait-anxiety, which happens in 200～250 ms during "Attention Blink". 7. Negative-cognitive processing bias of attention shift can be observed in young soldiers with trait-anxiety, whose attention resource is prone to be tied and hard to shift.8. Negative cognitive processing bias of memory recognition is found in young soldiers with trait-anxiety, and the recognition accuracy of negative stimulus is raised significantly.The study on trait-anxiety and characteristics of cognitive processing in young soldiers is a military valuable and challenging topic, which refers to many subjects and fields such as military psychology, cognitive psychology and healthy psychology, etc. The study has madesome breakthroughs and innovations as follows: (1) The selection of young soldiers------theprincipal part of soldiers, makes the participants to be more typical than before. Young soldiers, whose physiology and mentality are in the developmental period, have strong flexibility, making the result true and military valuable. (2) The introduction and application of IAPS with ecological effect has made the study more scientific and ecological. On the base of the attention and memory bias which are the emphases of cognitive processing in trait-anxiety, the suitable revision of paradigm by adding the supraliminal and subliminal stimulus variables have made the possibility to explore the cognitive processing characteristics in young soldiers in the early period (unconsciousness field) and the late period (consciousness field) of cognition. (3) The study has systematically explored the epidemic characteristics of trait-anxiety, the developmental characteristics of trait-anxiety in gender, army services, rank, age and service-age, and the influential factors of trait-anxiety in young soldiers. Furthermore, the study has explored the cognitive processing characteristics of spatial attention bias, temporal attention bias, attention shift bias and recognition bias in young soldiers with trait-anxiety.The study is not only of benefit to the mental health of soldiers, but also of practical value in the selection of soldiers, management of military activities, improvement of military performance, education of mental health of soldiers, psychological counseling and therapy of emotional disorder in soldiers, etc. The study has not only enlarged the field of trait-anxiety research, but also enriched the content of trait-anxiety research. It is a great promotion to the development and amalgamation of multi-subjects.