A Research On The Characteristics And Executive Functions Of Hoardeing Of College Students

Hoarding disorder is a condition in which a person has persistent difficulty in discarding or parting with possessions, which is caused by strong urges to save items and characterized by information processing deficits, irrational beliefs, emotional dysregulation and hoarding behaviors. Hoarding means to acquire or not discarding those useless and worthless goods. Hoarding is a universal adaptive behavior, however, hoarding addiction, get pathological from the normal collection development, it will affect the individual’s habits of diet and rest, may lead to individual problems in families, neighborhoods and other interpersonal issues seriously, yet it will produce health, environment issues and fire hazards, and even the whole society serious harm. Hoarding disorder occurs mainly in childhood and adolescence period, the incidence among the elderly is much higher than those of adolescents and adult. Moreover, researches show that hoarding disorder impaired their executive functions(such as: perception, memory, classification, conversion, suppression), that is the course of conscious control to thought and action. In this study, questionnaires and experimental method are used to test hoarder’s executive function in college students(such as inhibitory control, working memory, classification and decision-making ability). The result are as follows:1. Revised the Chinese version of the Saving Inventory-Revised(SI-R) has better reliability and validity and suitable for application in college students, and as identified tool of this article.2. There is a high tendency of hoarding behavior in college student, up to 10.74 percent. Hoarders and non-hoarders have significant differences in the family seat, but there was no significant difference in gender, profession and institutions.3. There are differences in executive function between hoarders and non-hoarders. In terms of control ability, working memory tasks, the ability to classify, and emotional decision-making, non-hoarders shows better ability than hoarders. In particular, in the working memory digit span test, the number of errors of hoarders significantly more than non-hoarders.