Affective Neuroscience Personality Characteristics And Its Relationship With Emotion, Cognitive Bias, And Resilience In Military Medical Students

Affective neuroscience personality often described as certain emotional characteristics,modulates an individual’s response to emotional challenges, as well as dispositional moodand also affects relevant cognitive processes. Individuals with different affectivepersonalities have different emotional reactions, indicating different responses to emotionalstimuli. With the deep understanding of affection, it is discovered that different emotionaldisorders have their own affective personality characteristics and neural physiological basis.Emotional experiences and reactions are strongly correlated with functions of some neuralcircuits. So using the form of language to assess the potential effect of primary emotionspersonality structure and bringing the unconscious emotional experience into consciouslevel could help to understand the role of each emotion system more accurately in affectivepersonality.However, few studies have examined affective personality characteristics in thecontext of China. To the best of our knowledge, no report exists regarding affectivepersonality among military medical students. In recent years, anxiety, insomnia, depressionand chronic fatigue have seriously affected on medical students’ normal life and study. Theirmilitary identity, closed living and learning environment under uniform management aswell as heavy military tasks and learning burden, seriously influence their mental health. Asa long-term and stable emotional reaction mode, affective personality may influenceindividual’s emotions, cognition, and psychological elasticity, while mental health isrestricted by individual’s emotion and cognition. Therefore, it has significant implications toexamine the affective personality characteristics in military medical students which mayoffer guidance for students’ selection and mental health education. In addition, it is of greatsignificance to identify the affective personality characteristics and the relationships amongaffective personality, resilience, positive and negative emotion, and cognitive bias, for improving the mental health and predicting stress-related emotional resilience in militarymedical students.Methods：To verify the reliability and validity of Chinese Affective NeurosciencePersonality Scale (ANPS) in1456military medical students. Affective NeurosciencePersonality Scale(ANPS), Connor Davidson Resilience Scale(CD-RISC), Attention toPositive and Negative Information Scale(APNIS), Chinese version of Positive and NegativeAffect Schedule(PANAS-C), The Simplified Ways of Coping Questionnaire(SWCQ) andSatisfaction With Life Scale(SWLS) were adopted to examine the characteristics ofaffective personality in1456military medical students and its relationships with affectivepersonality, resilience, cognitive attention, and emotion. By using positive/negativeaffective personality,129individuals were selected to participate in the subsequentbehavioral experiments. All data was collected for secondary input to ensure accurate data.SPSS18.0and AMOS17.0statistical software were adopted for statistical analysis. Themain statistical methods are: term screening, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatoryfactor analysis, correlation analysis, independent sample t-test, analysis of variance etc.Main findings in this study are as follows.1. Project screening and exploratory factor analysis suggest that69terms of originalscale were retained. Reliability analysis, validity analysis and confirmatory factor analysisfound that the total reliability coefficient was0.844, the structure validity RMSEA=0.043(<0.08), other fit indexes meet with the requirements of paychological assessment.2. Independent sample t-test in different groups of affective personality groupsrevealed that positive affective personality group got significantly higher scores thannegative group in resilience, positive cognitive bias, positive emotion and life satisfaction(P<0.01), as well as significantly lower scores than negative group in negative cognitive bias,negative emotion and negative coping(P <0.01). Significant positive correlations werefound between positive affective personality, resilience, positive cognitive bias, positiveemotion, positive coping (P <0.01). Significant negative correlations were found betweenfear, anger, sadness and negative cognitive bias, negative emotion, and negative coping onthe factors of negative affective personality (P <0.01).3. The results from behavioral experiments revealed that (1) In positive words recall,the memory performance in positive affective personality group was significantly better than that in negative affective personality group(P <0.01); while in negative words recall,the memory performance in negative affective personality group was significantly betterthan that in positive affective personality group(P <0.01).(2) Both groups had the highestaccuracy rate towards negative words and negative pictures. Accuracy rates differedsignificantly towards negative words but not significantly towards neutral and positivewords between the two groups (Ppositive=0.865, Pneutral=0.524). There was no significantaccuracy rate difference towards three kinds of pictures between the two groups (Ppositive=0.603, Pneutral=0.615, Pnegative=0.911).(3) For the positive affective personalitygroup, the response time of positive words was significantly longer than that of negativeones (Pnegative=0.004); while for the negative affective personality group, the response timeof negative words was significantly longer than that of positive and neutral ones (Ppositive=0.017,Pneutral=0.013). Response time of positive words in positive affectivepersonality group was significantly longer than that in negative affective personality group(P<0.01).(4) For the positive affective personality group, response time of positive pictureswas significantly longer than that of neutral and negative ones (Pneutral=0.000,Pnegative=0.000). For the negative affective personality group, response time ofnegative pictures was significantly longer than that of neutral ones (Pneutral=0.010). For thepositive affective personality group, response time of positive pictures was significantlylonger than that in negative affective personality group (P<0.01), while response time ofnegative pictures in negative affective personality group was significantly longer than thatin positive affective personality group (P<0.01).According to the results, there are three conclusions to draw from this study.1. The reliability and validity of the69-term Chinese edition of Affective NeurosciencePersonality Scale (ANPS) was good for the military medical students.2. Affective personality was correlated with resilience, cognitive bias, positive andnegative emotion, and coping style in military medical students. Positive affectivepersonality individuals had higher levels of resilience, positive cognitive bias, andreasonable coping styles and often experienced more positive emotions. Negative affectivepersonality individuals had lower levels of resilience, cognitive biases, and immaturecoping styles, and experienced more negative emotions.3. Positive affective personality individuals had attention bias towards positive stimulus information. They had a tendency to focus on more positive or neutral stimulus informationand filter unimportant negative information. On the contrary, negative affective personalityindividuals had attention bias to negative stimulus information and had a tendency to focustoo much on negative stimulus information.