Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Via Verdi 10, 10124 Turin, Italy.
Department of Psychology, Research Center in Communication Psychology, Universitá Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 20123 Milan, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Aug 6;23(15):6983. doi: 10.3390/s23156983.
Mental flexibility (MF) has long been defined as cognitive flexibility. Specifically, it has been mainly studied within the executive functions domain. However, there has recently been increased attention towards its affective and physiological aspects. As a result, MF has been described as an ecological and cross-subject skill consisting of responding variably and flexibly to environmental cognitive-affective demands. Cross-sectional studies have mainly focused on samples composed of healthy individual and of patients with chronic conditions such as Mild Cognitive Impairment and Parkinson's, emphasizing their behavioral rigidity. Our study is the first to consider a sample of healthy older subjects and to outline physiological and psychological markers typical of mental flexibility, to identify functional biomarkers associated with successful aging. Our results reveal that biomarkers (respiratory and heart rate variability assessments) distinguished between individuals high vs. low in mental flexibility more reliably than traditional neuropsychological tests. This unveiled the multifaceted nature of mental flexibility composed of both cognitive and affective aspects, which emerged only if non-linear multi-variate analytic approaches, such as Supervised Machine Learning, were used.
心理灵活性（MF）长期以来一直被定义为认知灵活性。具体来说，它主要在执行功能领域进行研究。然而，最近人们越来越关注它的情感和生理方面。因此，MF 被描述为一种生态和跨学科的技能，包括根据环境认知情感需求灵活多变地做出反应。横断面研究主要集中在由健康个体和患有慢性疾病（如轻度认知障碍和帕金森病）的患者组成的样本上，强调他们的行为僵化。我们的研究首次考虑了健康老年受试者的样本，并概述了心理灵活性的典型生理和心理标志物，以确定与成功衰老相关的功能生物标志物。我们的结果表明，生物标志物（呼吸和心率变异性评估）比传统的神经心理学测试更可靠地区分了心理灵活性高和低的个体。这揭示了心理灵活性的多面性，它由认知和情感两个方面组成，只有使用非线性多变量分析方法（如监督机器学习）才能显现出来。
