A Study On The Relationship Between Adversity, Emotional Types And Executive Function In Adolescents

Objective: Alexithymics have difficulties to express their emotions or feelings in words. A lot of studies confirmed that high alexithymics have defects in emotional cognitive processing and adjustment, which mainly related to emotional schema,theory of mind, executive function and other aspects. The studies about alexithymia and executive function, especially the hot executive function, were still very few. In this research, we chose adolescents as subjects, the Chinese version of Children Alexithymia Measure(CAM) as the screening tool and the modified Newman task paradigms of delayed gratification as the experimental task, aimed to explore the hot executive function characteristics of adolescents who have high-level alexithymia under different types of emotional experiences.Methods: Experiment 1: Revised the Children Alexithymia Measure(CAM), and analyzed its item discrimination, reliability and validity. Then used the formal Chinese version of Children Alexithymia Measure as the screening tool. Experiment 2: Used the subjects screened out by Chinese version of CAM as the experimental subjects,divided them into four groups(Positive emotion*Low score group; Positive emotion*High score group; Negative emotion*Low score group; Negative emotion*High score group) to participate the delay of gratification task. Recorded how many times the delay button was selected by each subject as the experimental result.Results: Experiment 1: The formal Chinese version of Children Alexithymia Measure was an instrument with good item discrimination(0.575≦r≦0.809, p﹤.01;0.367≦D≦0.743, p ﹤.001). After the exploratory factor analysis, we deleted two items, and verified the Cronbach Alpha was 0.843. Four weeks later, we tested the CAM again and got a reasonable test-retest reliability(r=0.759, p﹤.01). During the revision, we ensured the content validity of CAM. And we also tested the correlation coefficient between CAM and DDF, got the number 0.973(p﹤.01), which suggested that the formal CAM had a high criterion validity. Experiment 2: During the delayed gratification task, the group of P*L got the best results, the second was N*L and P*H,N*H group got the worst record. After Variance analysis and Independent-Sample T test, we found that both the emotional type and the level of alexithymia had effects on the task performance. The High group gets the lower score than Low group in bothpositive emotion and negative emotion, but the difference did not reach significant level under the negative emotion. There were also significant differences between positive emotion and negative emotion, the former brought better result.Conclusion: The formal Chinese version of Children Alexithymia Measure is a simple and effective observer scale to measure adolescent’s alexithymia level. High level of alexithymics have impairment in hot executive function, and emotions have effect on their hot executive function.