The Applied Study of Psychological Tests and Brain-computer Interfaces on Selection of Antarctic Explorers

Headnote

Abstract: As a typical representative of the extreme environment, Antarctic is cold, confine, isolated and single stimulated. Few people can adapt well in Antarctic. What kind of features previous explorers have to adapt to the extreme environment? In this study, we took the Chinese explorers from team 21-32 as our objects and analyzed the data of personality traits, personality types and mental health, so that we summed up the 16PF, MBTI, SCL-90, SAS and SDS as selection indices. The conclusions are: The explorers exhibited higher gregariousness, conscientiousness in 16PF; Most of the explorers' personality type is STJ; Most of the people are mental health. The application of automatic processes trainings will improve the accuracy and effectiveness of selection. With the development of VR and BCIs in extreme environment, it will provide instructions of selection indicators for the selection and training of Antarctic teams.

Keywords: Personality type, ICE, Psychological selection, Automatic processes training, Brain-computer interface.

1.Introduction

Antarctica is the coldest and toughest place on the earth where there are special geographical location, harsh and extreme natural environment. The isolated confine environment brings a series of physiological and psychological problems to people who work and live in Antarctica for a long time. The most frequently encountered problems include physical problems, emotional problems, human resource problems and task problems. Specifically, first of all, polar researchers found that Antarctic expedition personnel will appear a series of adverse symptoms, such as sleep problems, anxiety, headache, feeling lonely, depressed, and so on because of the great changes in the living environment. These symptoms are referred to as "winter syndrome" (Yan, 2009). Secondly, the work in the Antarctic is hard, boring and repetitive, which has a higher requirement on the team members' professional skills and psychological quality. Thirdly, it's easily to generate interpersonal conflict because of the lack of privacy in artificial station. In addition, due to the special location and environment, the risk and the cost of rescue are both quite high if accident happens, which bring a huge loss of labor and material resources.

As early as the age of heroes, people have found the importance of mental health in the selection. Some explorers had mental disorders during the expedition, such as visual hallucination, auditory hallucination and etc. Some others suffered from mental illness after returning home. The appearance of mental disease mainly related to the extremely isolated and closed environment of Antarctic. In order to guarantee the expedition, we need to select out those who probably have a history of mental disease, psychiatric symptoms, or other traits that can easily lead to mental disorders.

Personality trait is also an important considerationfor selection. Whetherthe explorerscan adapted to the polar life well and quickly is an important indicator while personality trait is a predictor for adaptation and speed. Scientists have found that traits like extraversion and arbitrariness can reversely predict the ability to adaptation and adjustment under the extreme environment (Rosnet, Le Scanff, & Sagal, 2000). Palinkas mentioned in a report that more than half of the team members were considered unqualified for their emotional instability in an Antarctic research station in 1957 (Palinkas, 2003). It will avoid a lot of conflict if we can eliminate inappropriate team members of the station through personality trait selection. Rosnet's study in 2000 showed that people's lower extraversion can predict high mission performance (Rosnet et al., 2000). But Sarris's research in 2006 was just the opposite, and he thought high extraversion was more able to predict the high mission capability (Sarris, 2006).

As a similar extreme environment, there are lots of simulate experiments in space researches. Some researchers simulated the extreme, confine and isolated environment under the condition of weightlessness and measured the mood of the members. By monitoring the physiological indexes, it was found that the galvanic skin response decreased significantly after the simulated weightlessness, and even in the two days after the end of the experiment, it was not recovered to the baseline level. At the same time, the heart rate variability of the subjects significantly decreased after the weightlessness. The frontal EEG asymmetry in the prefrontal lobe of the team members also showed a linear trend after weightlessness (Liu et al., 2014).

With the application of virtual reality in military aerospace and industrial simulation, it has been extended to more extreme environments. Multiuser interaction in virtual reality leads to collaborative virtual environments that promote the development of social skills in teamwork, in particular with members in different geographic locations. (Gasca, Gloria et al, 2015) In the extreme environment, the automation of the processing process can make the habit of reaction rate more rapid. This reaction is unconscious and can reduce energy loss. It can form the process of automatic processing through the task training and can better predict the behavior of the team members in the mission (Xu, et al. 2014). At the same time, it can also save the cognitive resources of team members. So the task performance of the team members will be improved while they allocate more energy to the mission that require more resource.

The selection of psychological tests helps us eliminate the abnormal members and select in the members who may be more adapted to the extreme environment. Brain computer interface technology can select and extract the psychological qualities of the team members from a deeper level based on the response of computer output about the EEG and physiological indexes. And the training of automatic processing of members can help team to establish a better habit, improve task performance, reduce the cognitive loss and ensure the safety.

2. The development of the psychological selection in China

The program of psychological tests and selection for the Antarctic pre-selected team members in China is constantly revised and improved during the period of 2004-2015. In the previous selection, members were relatively scarce, the task was to maintain the normal operation of the over-winter stations and collect conventional scientific data, which was quite simple. At that time, the team members could not have a timely communication with command offices while the Antarctic has not been established a network system. The physical, psychological and social functions of the team members were significantly affected by isolated, confine and extreme environment, and there were obvious 3/4 phenomena, winter-over syndrome and so on. At the same time, the Great Wall Station and the Zhongshan Station were in the construction and expanded period. Therefore, the living facilities, working conditions and the environment on the whole were relatively tough.

With the increasing of the new stations, there will be more people to go to Antarctic. The increasing in personnel also means the opening of the selection approaches. There are more members to participate in the Antarctic winter team through an independent application. The increasing complexity of the members also leads to higher risk of overwinter in Antarctic. Team size and management difficulties, communication cost and accident risk are nonlinear proportional correlation. Secondly, higher requirements of cooperation ability, team awareness and behavior have been put forward with the establishment of the aviation systems. Finally, network in Antarctica makes the work environment change greatly and the living condition is getting better. Therefore, the requirements of team members' special technical will be higher and stricter. Quality management occupies a strategic place in organizations, in addition to use of it tools in information architecture aligned facilitates the challenge of accomplishing more with less by promoting competitiveness and sustainability (Freixo & Rocha, 2014).

These great changes make it more difficult for us to select the Antarctic members. We should strengthen our understanding of the members during the selection process, develop a proper selection project and evaluation method, reduce the risk in Antarctic and ensure the expedition successfully and safely.

This research has carried on a detailed analysis and summary about the psychological test results of the members from team 21-32 in China. The personality types and mental health of the pre-select Antarctic over-winter members were described. It provides the scientific support and guiding principles for the improvement of the existing management support system, the selection project and the training course.

3. Methods

3.1 Environment

They over-winter explorers need to stay in Antarctic for 12-17 months. Most of the team members undertake the task of maintaining normal operation of the whole station while some members assume the scientific research tasks. Now, the construction of network communication of Zhongshan Station and Great Wall Station is more perfect. The members can get in touch with family through satellite phone or network.

The Great Wall Station is located on the west side of the Antarctic, which is at the outer edge of the Antarctic Circle and the south of King George Island (62°12' 59 '' S,58°57' 52'' E). 85% of the island area is covered in ice. Annual average temperature of the island is-2.8°C. Its annual rainfall is 550 mm and the annual average wind speed is 7.2 m / s. Zhongshan Station is located on the east side of the Antarctic inside the Antarctic Circle. It is an ideal area for the Antarctic marine and continental scientific expedition while its geographic coordinates are 69 °22 '24 "S and 76°22' 24" E with typical Antarctic natural environment characteristics.

3.2. Subjects

According to the data of team 21-32, there is only one woman of the 476 members who have accepted the Antarctic over-winter psychological tests. Their ages are in the range of 22-59 years old and the average age is 38 years old. Statistical analysis of the age of each team found that the overall average age of each team is in the age of 36-39 years old.

3.3. Tools

16PF or 15FQ personality test

The 16PF is a questionnaire compiled by professor Cattell who comes from Illinois State University. The scale describes the personality characteristics of individuals from 16 aspects. It is widely applied in many fields. Not only suitable for individual tests, but also applicable to group testing. We can find out the outstanding personality traits of the Antarctic team members through the personality test.

MBTI

MBTI is a kind of personality assessment tool with forced selection and self-report. It is divided into 4 dimensions: the internal and external direction, the way of information acquisition, the decision method and the behavior way. Like other personality tests, the test results only reflect different action style of people. The content validity, criterionrelated validity and construct validity of the Chinese version of the MBIT were good.

SCL-90, SAS, SDS

SCL-90 is also known as Self-reporting Inventory. Derogatis created the SCL-90 scale. The scale consists of nine symptom dimensions: somatic, obsessive-compulsive; sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, anxiety of phobia, paranoia and mental quality. A lot of studies have shown that it has good reliability and validity in Chinese version (Xie Hua, Dai Haiqi, 2006).

Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) assesses the subjective anxiety of the people by the way of self-assessment. SAS was compiled by Zung in 1971. It is also a self-rating scale which is divided into 4 grades and contains 20 items. Many researches in China shows that SAS is one of the self-assessment tools with high reliability and validity.

Self-Rating Depression Scale, the prototype of SDS is Zung Depression Scale (Zung, 1965). It can reflect the depression degree of the subjects' subjective perception to some extent through the self-assessment method. It is generally believed that SDS is able to accurately reflect the depression degree of the subjects' subjective perception.

This study analyzes the available data by using SPSS 18.0.

4.Results

4.1. 16PF ori5FQ personality test

For the over-winter members, early teams like 21-26 are used the 15FQ personality test which is the British version questionnaire of 16PF. 15FQ is developed and revised in recent years and is one of the widely used personality tests. It follows the core of the 16PF personality test, and combines with the five factors of the big five personality test. It has high reliability and validity in Chinese personality test. After the analysis of all the data, the dimensions and factor scores are listed as follows.

As can be seen from the table 1, the standard points of the members in 16 dimensions are above the middle level comparing with the norm level. They are outstanding in emotional stability, dependency, conscientiousness, agreeableness and dependence, which shows that the Antarctic explorers are emotional stability, friendly and apprehensive with strong emotional control ability and strong sense of responsibility and at the same time, the explorers tend to focus on the specific reality, and they are calm and gentle.

The result of analyzing candidates-out and candidates-in with independent t-test shows that there are no differences in the 16 dimensions of the test. Using ANOVA to analyze scores of members who have been there for different times in different dimensions and the result shows that there are no significant differences in the scores of 16PF or 15FQ in each dimension.

4.2.MBTI

MBTI tests are used to classify different types of personality. The statistical results of the behavior style of all participants in the selection of 21-32 teams are shown in Table 2.

The result shows that the extroverted members of the team are significantly more than the introverted members. Most of the team members get information through their sensation while there are a small part of members accessing information through intuition. In terms of decision-making, most of the team members make decisions according to their deliberation while there are a small part of emotional decision makers. The vast majority of members are judgment behavior style and a few members act through their perception.

It can be known through the frequency statistics of each individual dimension that the behavior types of the Antarctic over-winter explorers are generally inclined to extroversion, sensing, thinking and judging (ESTJ). The frequency and proportion of the specific types were known from table 3.

381 Antarctic expedition team members in team 21-32 appear all kinds of behavior styles, in which ESTJ type is most representative with 31.0%. ISTJ accounts for 18.6%. Generally speaking, the psychological functions of the STJ accounts for 49.6% of all members when we put aside the introversion and extroversion of the personality. Nearly half of the members' functions is feeling, thinking and judging. In addition, ESFJ accounts for 15.2%, ISFJ accounts for 7.9%. Therefore except for introversion and extroversion, SFJ becomes the second commonest type in Antarctic which accounts for 23.1%.

From the result of independent t-test to candidates-in and candidates-out, it do not show a significant difference in the score except the dimension of introverted and extroverted (P=0.ü6).Every Antarctic expedition team has a different style, which is related closely to the personality and behavior style of each team member.

4.3.SCL-90, SAS, SDS

We made psychological tests on anxiety, depression and mental health for the 21-32 team members and we get the following results:

Through the mean of SAS, we find that most of the candidates do not have anxiety symptoms and there are 14 candidates whose SAS score are more than 50 points according to the frequency table.

Most of members do not have depressive symptoms. According to the frequency statistics and the maximum we can see that there are 20 members whose score are more than 50 points in SDS.

According to the psychological health evaluation report of the members we can conclude that their mental health condition is good in general. Only some individual values of few members are bigger than 2, there is a certain mental illness. We should pay attention to the mental health.

The t-test shows that the vast majority of candidates in the SAS, SDS and SCL-90 do not show symptoms and their mental health status are good. There are no significant differences in all dimensions for candidates-in and candidates-out.

The ANOVA between members in different posts shows that the SDS and SAS scores are significantly different (F=5.58, p=0.007<0.0i in SDS and F=8.22, p=0.00i<0.0i in SAS) . In the SAS test, the scores are significant difference between logistics and researches with p=0.0i4<0.05. The mean score of researchers is lower than logistics, which means that their mental state is better than logistics in the case of anxiety. Similarly, in the SDS test, the scores are significant difference between logistics and researches with p=0.006<0.0i. The mean score of researches is lower than logistics.

Discussion

In this paper, we analyzed the selection data of Chinese Antarctic expedition teams in recent 10 years. We have a clearer and more comprehensive understanding to the problem who can be a member of Antarctic expedition team through testing the different measurements. As the participations are selected and recommended through each unit, and audited by the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration, so they have the homogeneity in all aspects to some extent. The evaluation results of these members have a good representative to the Antarctic selection index.

In the test of personality traits, when comparing the members of 21-26th team with the common norm, we find that the Antarctic members perform more prominent in sociability, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and team interdependence. In our selection process, we should pay more attention to candidates' ability of getting along well with others, conscientiousness, stable mood as well as physical and mental health and work ability.

We classified the participations in behavior styles and personality types according to MBTI. ESTJ is the most typical personality type which accounts for 31% of all members in the team. This shows to some extent that our members tend to be more extroverted. And previous literature also referred that people were more likely to select 'clown' members (Ye, Yan, 2010). It is not to say that an introverted person is not suitable to go to Antarctic, people who are ISTJ type also accounts for 19% and becomes the second largest personality type. There is no significant difference of personality types between explorers who have been there for various times. It indicates personality type has stability.

As mentioned in the previous, the selected candidates for the Antarctic are screened elaborately, so there is no difference in the performance of mental health. Most of the members' scores in the SCL-90, SAS and SDS are in the normal range. There are few members have mental health problem, which may be related to their work and living conditions. In addition, some members appear mild anxiety or depression symptoms, which may be related to their work condition or early experience. There is no obvious change rule after analyzing the data of members who have been there for many times.

Lack of data is an unavoidable problem in the study of extreme environmental problems. It not only requires collaborative effort of the researchers and the subjects, but also depends on the development of extreme environmental psychology. In current study, we mainly use the way of self-rating scale and behavior observation to classify and sketch the psychological characteristics of explorers. In the self-rating scale, there may be some problems like the social desirability or cognitive bias. With the combination of cognitive neuroscience and computer technology, we may use the virtual reality technology like the industrial simulation technology and emergency response technology to simulate the work and life situation in the Antarctic research stations. Through the brain-computer interaction technology, we can collect and decode the members' brain signals with different environments and tasks so that we can select in the well performed members. The analysis of the results of EEG signals under different tasks can also predict members' behavior in the follow-up EEG monitoring and play a role in a timely prevention. At the same time, it can reduce the physical and cognitive loss in the extreme environment through using BCI technology to complete some of the basic tasks.

In addition, we can also select-out and select-in members in the further training system. When faced with some basic tasks, the more skilled they operate, and even finish it unconsciously by automatic processing, the less consumption of their physical and mentality. Through the training of automatic processing ability in some simple tasks, it can help us to pick out some excellent members. It will ensure the safety of work, reduce the risk of psychological abnormalities and improve work performance.

With the increasingly development of polar studies, researchers in many countries are more concerning about the researches of polar psychology. In consideration of lack of data, perhaps we can cooperate with other countries to design the selection and adaptation project. So that we can have a further exploration to the problems in the Antarctic region and make the cross-cultural study. As well as improve the selection of Antarctic team more systematic and scientific.

Conclusions

1. Chinese Antarctic explorers show higher sociability, conscientiousness, emotional stability and team interdependence on the 16PF than common crowd;

2. Most of the explorers are type STJ in the MBTI in China. Extroverts are more than introverts, but it does not show that the introverted persons are maladapted.

3. In general, Chinese Antarctic explorers are mental health in the SCL-90, SAS and SDS scores. There are few members having psychological symptoms to some degree and mental health will be selected as the psychological selection index.

We should take full advantages of psychological selection and find out what kind of consist of members with different personality types can really promote team operation and management. At the same time, according to the existing science and technology, we may apply the brain-computer interface and virtual reality to the selection of the Antarctic members, strengthen the task training of automatic process and grasp the work of psychological security, so as to provide long-term and sustained psychological support for Antarctic expedition.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities Research Projects (No. skqy20i648).

References

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