College Students With Diverse Personalities: Study On The Relations Between Cool And Hot Executive Function And The Three Subcomponents Of Central Executive Function

Executive function (EF) is a complex cognitive process which individual coordinates subsystem activities through dynamic and flexible approaches, and then performs purpose behaviors. EF has close connections with many other human high-level mental functions, and is one of the frontier topics in psychological research. Since a lot of Neurological mental illnesses have shown the symptoms of EF disorders, in the meanwhile are related to different individual personalities, therefore, this paper mainly discusses the relations between different personality types and executive function to see if there are some interrelations between two. In the research, we applied three subcomponents detached from EF through a Latent Variable Analysis by Miyake:inhibition of prepotent responses, memory updating, and attention switching, in case to more thoroughly understand the EF characters of extroversive and introversive personalities.Zelazo and Muller divided EF into two different types by its physiological mechanism, one is named'cool', and the other is'hot', which are stimulated by different representations. Cool EF is purely cognitive which is aroused by some abstract and contextual experiences, which is related to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, DL-PFC; while hot EF is more emotional involved, which is called forth by necessary emotive meaning test tasks on the stimulus. It is relevant to orbitofrontal cortex, OFC. There are many test tasks on EF, for'cool', we normally use approaches like Go/No-Go, Stroop; and for the other, emotive stimulus materials such as vocabularies and affective pictures are more applied. Traditionally we use words or pictures that without any affections in the test tasks on cool EF. But now research shows that cool and hot EF are not absolutely separated from each other, and for most tests both components are included.Previous research on cool and hot EF relations seldom concerns with the Central Executive Function level, while this paper's priority is to make a significant research on the relationship of cool and hot EF from the level of Central Executive Function's three subcomponents.The research chose college students as subjects, and took one pre-test and three formal tests. In the pre-test, EPQ is used to assess the subjects'personalities, according to which subjects are divided into to two groups by their introversive and extroversive characteristics. And in the following tests, cognitive tasks are applied to test the EF subcomponents of the groups.The research studies 130 college students on their responses of inhibition, switching and updating functions when identifying the emotive and non-emotive stimulus, and focuses on exploring the interactions of Central Executive Function's three subcomponents in performing the cool and hot EFs, as well as the influences of different personality characteristics on cool and hot EFs.