The Impact Of Earthquake Experience On The Identification Of Chinese Characters

As a traumatic event, Wenchuan earthquake has kinds of serious influence on psychological distress and disorder in the overall population. The previous studies have found the impact of the earthquake on psychological and cognitive functions in people without a clinical disorder, and that direct personal experience has made subjuects sensitive to earthquake information. Chinese character recognition is an important cognitive ability of human. The present study try to investigate whether the identification of Chinese character is also influenced by the experience of the earthquake and has shown cognitive impairment.Perceptual interference effect is the finding that for a vague or incomplete secondary stimulation, the first presented part of its features will interfere with the identification of the stimulus. The one in Chinese characters reflects the recognition of incomplete or ambiguous characters.Using the interference effect in Chinese characters as experimental paradigm, earthquake-related and unrelated characters as experimental material, and the juniors of Sichuan Mianzhu Nanxuan High School and Sichuan Instrument Industrial School which is located in Beibei Chongqing as experimental and control groups, the present study tried to investigate several specific questions as follows:1) whether the earthquake experience would affect the identification of related characters? If it did, the role playing was in promoting or hindering? 2) whether the interference effect would still exist in the earthquake-related characters? 3) What was the possible internal mechanism of the earthquake affecting the identification of the earthquake-related characters?All subjects of each group were tested with the method of Laboratory experiment.Using the typical interference effect paradigm, Experiment 1 made a preliminary study of the identification of vague characters related and unrelated to the earthquake. Using the interference effecet paradigm with unfilled interval, Experiment 2 explored the impact of unfilled interval on the identification of vague characters related and unrelated to the earthquake. The results showed that:1. The experimental group had a higher performance of the identification of earthquake-related characters, and the earthquake experience had promoted the identification of earthquake-related characters;2. All subjects had conceptual interference effect in the identification of all Chinese characters;3.The interferenc effect disappeared in the identification of "nornal" Chinese character by "normal" subjects, but still appeared in the earthquake-related characters by the subjects with experience of earthquake when the duration of interval was 450ms. According to the competitive activation model, The earthquake-related characters had higher activation level;4.The identification of earthquake-related characters maybe influenced by the subject's social background (earthquake experience).