Study on the relationships among adverse childhood experiences, life events and executive function of college students

Objective To investigate the effects of adverse childhood experiences and life events on the college students' inhibitory control ability,cognitive flexibility,and working memory,and to provide a reference for intervention work in relevant fields.Methods A total of 658 college students were selected from Yantai and Jinan,and the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs),adolescent life event scale(ASLEC) were used to screen subjects,E-prime software was applied to design the experiment of three subsystems of executive function.Results The incidence rate of ACEs was 44.8%;ACEs,life events and the inhibition ability have a significant correlation(r=0.50,0.47,P<0.01);In the switching task,the reaction time of ACEs group was longer than that of non-ACEs(t=-2.55,P<0.05).Compared with the group of low score in life events,the group of high score used longer reaction time in the tasks of inhibition,switching and working memory,longer average response task switching(t =3.16,2.45,2.46,P<0.01).The regression analysis results showed that ACEs,life events could predict 46% of the inhibiting ability,and ACEs and life events were of statistical significance to the regression of inhibiting ability,with the total prediction rate of 56% to the inhibiting ability.Conclusion The prevalence of adverse childhood experiences is high among the college students.Both the adverse childhood experiences and life events have negative effects on executive function of college students.