Emotional Intelligence Moderates The Relationship Between Regional Gray Matter Volume In The Bilateral Temporal Pole And Critical Thinking Disposition

Critical thinking is a kind of reasonable,reflective thinking focused on making decisions regarding actions and beliefs(Ennis,1992).Disposition has been considered as internal motivation(Facione et al.1996)or individual habits/tendencies(Stedman and Andenoro,2007)respecting critical thinking.The development of critical thinking skills is crucial for learning and overall cognitive development in students(Mc Bride et al.2002;Ennis,2008;Stapleton,2011).Strong critical thinkers are curious with respect to information and knowledge and display the ability to be open-minded without harboring prejudices toward differing opinions(Facione,2007).Further,such individuals engage in systematic analytical thinking to make judicious decisions and are confident in their respective reasoning abilities(Facione,1990;Facione,2007;Lai,2011).As such,good critical thinkers are not only highly skilled in terms of reasoning but are also prudent and understanding.Though individual variations in regional gray matter have been associated with behavioral differences for a vast array of human behaviors(Kanai and Rees,2011),the relationship of critical thinking disposition with respect to regional gray matter morphology has yet to be investigated.Critical thinking disposition in nursing students is positively correlated with perspective taking and good critical thinkers always concern for others(Jeong,2015).Researchers have therefore inferred that good critical thinkers may more effectively detect,understand,and respond to the emotions of others(Stedman and Andenoro,2007;Paul and Elder,2013).Temporal pole activation was additionally observed when participants were required to focus on the thoughts and emotions of others(Moll et al.2002;Heekeren et al.2003;Grèzes et al.2004).Besides,Mahmoud(2012)further observed a significant relationship between critical thinking disposition in nursing students and active/reflective learning styles and Atay and Karabacak(2012)instructed nursing students on care planning using concept mapping and observed that this strategy improved scores related to critical thinking disposition,indicating beneficial effects related to the integration,organization,and retrieval aspects of memory.Activation of the lateral temporal lobe has been observed when participants are required to retrieve semantic concepts of interest(Prince et al.2007;Sanjuán et al.2015),while activity in the hippocampal and parahippocampal regions of the medial temporal lobe has been associated with episodic encoding and memory retrieval(Schacter and Wagner,1999;Qin et al.2015).The parahippocampal cortex in particular has been observed to play a role in contextual association Aminoff et al.(2007)as well as in memory consolidation(Van Strien et al.,2009;Wang and Morris,2010).In summary,the aforementioned imaging studies indicate that the temporal pole and medial temporal regions — particularly the parahippocampal gyrus — are crucially involved in shaping an individual ' s critical thinking disposition.Two studies were conducted in this paper.The first study firstly explored the brain structure of critical thinking disposition.The participant group consisted of 296 healthy,right-handed volunteers(159 females;mean age: 19.74 years;standard deviation: 1.26 years;age range: 17–27 years)involved in an ongoing project aimed at investigating associations among brain imaging data,creativity,and mental health in Southwest University.This study has excluded those participants with a history of neurological or psychiatric disorders,who had received mental health treatment,or who had taken psychiatric medications and has deleted some subjects who's behavior data was missing.We used multiple regression analysis in the whole-brain analyses to examine if there are some regions where r GMV is associated with individual differences in the level of critical thinking disposition,controlling for gender,age,general intelligence,and total brain gray matter.We investigated significant results at p < 0.001 uncorrected for multiple comparisons(with a minimal cluster size of100 voxels)and found that the total score of Critical thinking disposition was negatively correlated with GM volume in clusters that included the left temporal pole extending to the bilateral parahippocampal region,the precuneus gyrus.Besides,small volume correction(SVC)based regional-based analysis revealed the gray matter volume of the left temporal pole(r=-0.192,p<0.01),right temporal pole(r=-0.169,p<0.01)areboth significantly negatively correlated with the total score of CCTDI.In the second study,we firstly revealed the correlation between critical thinking disposition and emotional intelligence with the Pearson product-moment correlation and canonical correlation analysis.The Pearson product-moment correlation's result indicated there is a weak yet significant positive correlation between emotional intelligence and CCTDI scores(r=0.28,p<0.01).In addition,the relative lower redundant index and lower shared variance of the two generated groups of canonical variables from the old variables from emotional intelligence and critical thinking disposition respectively showed the correlation in between this two variables is in deed not high correlated.Maybe the different measuring tools is a possible factor accounting for the not high correlation coefficients found in the previous research.However,the significant positive correlation between emotional intelligence and critical thinking disposition is undoubted.Next,the former researches showed individuals who have higher emotional intelligence tend to be more tolerant of stress and anxiety and will be more flexible when faced with ambiguity,pressure,and anxiety(Afshar and Rahimi,2016),and are more likely to seek objective rather than supportive information to support their viewpoints(Mc Pherson,1983).Emotional intelligence has been further observed to correlate with higher levels of reasoning ability(Saxena and Singhvi,2015),reduced effort in building and maintaining social relationships(Murensky,2000),increased attention and participation in school/cognitive activities(Bora,2012),and higher social and verbal intelligence,among others(Mayor et al.2004).Considering the tight relation between emotional and memory processing and critical thinking disposition and the different cognition feature of individuals with higher or lower emotional intelligence,the present study hypothesized that higher levels of emotional intelligence may result in better performance on measures of critical thinking disposition.The moderation analysis result met our hypothesis,the emotional intelligence moderated the relation between the gray matter volume of bilateral temporal pole and critical thinking disposition.In other words,individuals with higher emotional intelligence are more sensitive and can more effectively deal with the social and emotional context,which may be associated with critical thinking disposition,with such a relationship reflected in the smaller gray matter volume of the bilateral temporal pole.