Effects Of Alcohol Expectations On College Students Executive Function And Creative Thinking

Alcohol is an inhibitor of the central nervous system. Alcohol can make the permeability of blood brain barrier increase, which results in damage to the central nervous system. Alcohol intake can damage the cognitive function of the individual, such as plan, attention, decision making, problem solving and behavior control. The executive function is a kind of high-level cognitive functions to coordinate all kinds of cognitive processes during the complex cognitive tasks, and a general control mechanism to ensure that the cognitive system is flexible and optimized to implement the specific objectives. Executive function includes such main components as inhibition, shifting, and updating. Creative thinking is a complex cognitive process, involving the extraction of the project, the conversion of the processing type and the suppression of irrelevant information. Executive function is responsible for the overall planning, monitoring and evaluation of creative thinking. Thus, it can be proved that there may be a certain relationship between executive function and creative thinking.90 university students who were social drinkers were allocated randomly by a lottery method to drinking group, control group and placebo group. The Stroop task, 1-Back task, local-global task and the creative thinking test were employed to explore the influence of a moderate dose of alcohol and alcohol expectancy on the executive function and creative thinking of college students’ social drinkers.The results showed that:1. Drinking group was compared with the control group, and the differences were statistically significant in three dimensions of executive function. Placebo group was compared with the control group, the differences were no statistically significant in the three dimensions of executive function. In the drinking group, positive expectation was negatively correlated to the response time of executive function’s each dimension, which indicated positive expectation is positively related to executive function level. Thereinto, the inhibition and the shifting process appeared significant correlation with negative expectation. Negative expectation was positively correlated to the response time of executive function’s each dimension, which indicated negative expectation is negatively related to executive function level. Thereinto, the shifting process appeared significant correlation with negative expectation. Regression analysis showed that positive expectation had significantly positive predictions to inhibition and shifting process, which indicated that the damage of inhibition function and shifting process was slight after the students of high-level positive expectation drank.2. Drinking group compared with the control group in the creative thinking of the total score, fluency, originality and verbal originality, the differences were statistically significant. There were no significant differences in the creative thinking of flexibility and figural originality. Placebo group compared with the control group in the creative thinking of fluency and verbal originality, the differences were statistically significant, the score of placebo group was lower than control group, and there were no significant differences in the creative thinking of the total score, flexibility, originality and figural originality. In the drinking group, positive expectation was positively related to the creative thinking of fluency and verbal originality.3. Correlation analysis showed that: The relationship between executive function and creative thinking was not significant. But the relevant trends showed that the higher students’ level of executive function, the higher the score of creative thinking would be. The executive function was most closely related to the originality of creative thinking.The study reached the following conclusions: Some dimensions of executive function of college students were damaged after moderate alcohol intake. The placebo effect of alcohol existed in creative thinking, but not in executive function. There were differences between executive function and creative thinking damage of different alcohol expectancy drinkers. There is a certain relationship between executive function and creative thinking.