An Experiment Investigation Of The Effect Of Personality And Emotion On Cognitive Flexibility

The study of cognitive flexibility is the hotspot and advancing topic in the development psychology. Cognitive flexibility is an ability of switching mental idea.It is an important character of human intelligence. Cognitive flexibility can make our reaction adapt to the present demands.Many studys proved that the potisive emotion can promote the cognitive flexibility.Many studys proved that neurotic correlate with negative emotions, such as fear, sadness, guilt and enmity. Extroversion correlate with positive emotions, such as happy and self-approval(Watson & Clark,1992).Emotion is one of the important factors which effect cognitive flexibility. The relationship of personality and cognitive flexibility needs more study. In the examination of cognitive flexibility, many investigators adopt the Dimensional Change Card Sorting(DCCS),the content is color figures. In our life, there are lots of emotion information, which can arose people relevant emotion, and impact the imformation prosession. This study use the undergraduates as the testees, adopt the Dimensional Change Card Sorting(DCCS),explore the different personality testees in different emotion processing the emotion information and unemotion information, and the relationship of the emotion, personality, tast type and cognitive flexibility.This study included one preparation and two experiments. The preparation use the Eysenck personality questionnaire screen out the high neurotic and low neurotic testees and extroversion and introversion testees in the undergraduates testees. The experiments tests adopts the Dimensional Change Card Sorting(DCCS). In the first experiment, the subjects were asked to view positive, neutral and negative emotion pictures to investigate the effect of emotional stmuli on cognitive flexibility. The second experiment include a simple tesk and a difficult tesk. The aim of the experiment is to explore the difference of different personality testees complete different difficulty tasks in different emotion. We also want to explore the difference of different personality testees switch the emotion words. The study adopt C# programme to present the emotion pictures and collect the data. We use the SPSS10.0 to analyse the data. The findings in this study are shown as follows:1. Under the condition of passive emotion, testees cognitive flexibility is better than testees under the condition of nagitive emotion.2. Low neurotic testees cognitive flexibility is better than high neurotic testees cognitive flexibility.3. Under the condition of passive emotion, extroversion testees cognitive flexibility is better than introversion testees cognitive flexibility. Under the condition of nagitive emotion, low neurotic testees cognitive flexibility is better than high neurotic testees cognitive flexibility.4. High neurotic testees cognitive flexibility is better under the condition of passive emotion than nagitive emotion condition. Extroversion testees cognitive flexibility is prominently better under passive emotion condition than nagitive emotion condition.5. High neurotic testees performance of nagitive emotion words is remarkably better than the performance of passive emotion words. Extroversion testees performance of passive emotion words is remarkably better than the performance of nagitive emotion words.6. Under the condition of identical value, testees cognitive flexibility is better than testees under the condition of different value.7. Under the condition of different value, low neurotic testees cognitive flexibility is better than high neurotic testees cognitive flexibility.8. The cognitive flexibility of simple task is better than the cognitive flexibility of diffcult task.