Abstract
Identification of social risk factors and the promotion of stress coping mechanisms and mental resilience are topics of interest in the field of mental health. The relationships between risk- or tolerability-associated factors and task-related hemodynamic responses in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in adolescents may have important implications for mental health challenges. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between task-related PFC hemodynamic activities and subjective well-being or lifestyle habits using wearable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). In this study, after sample refinement to reduce heterogeneity, 20 university students were included in verbal working memory (VWM) task analyses and 21 were included in spatial working memory (SWM) task analyses. The task-related hemodynamic responses were detected using wearable NIRS. To assess the risk- or tolerability-associated factors, the levels of positive and negative affect were assessed using the Subjective Well-Being Inventory (SUBI) and lifestyle habits (such as gaming) were evaluated using a nine-item questionnaire. There was a positive correlation between SUBI positive affect and VWM task-related oxy-hemoglobin signal changes in the right dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), underlining the significance of subjective well-being as an important independent emotional domain and suggesting the possibility of the differential objective evaluations of subjective well-being in the right PFC. Negative correlations between PFC activities during both VWM and SWM tasks at the left DLPFC and the number of game playing days in 1 week were also statistically significant, suggesting the presence of modality-non-specific hemodynamic regulation by habitual game playing. Each correlation was still robust after the elimination of major confounding impacts. Although further replication studies are warranted to confirm these preliminary results, this investigation of the relationship between task-related PFC hemodynamic activities and emotional domains or lifestyle habits might have clinical significance with regard to primary prevention of mental health issues in university students. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of these relationships with the use of wearable NIRS, which enables measurement under near natural conditions and is easy to use in schools or workplaces.
Highlights
Identification of modifiable social risk factors across the lifespan and the promotion of prevention are topics of interest in the field of global mental health (Collins et al, 2011)
Significant correlations were observed between the negative affect score and internet use time (r = −0.44, p = 0.0450), TABLE 1 | Correlation between the Subjective Well-Being Inventory (SUBI) score and lifestyle questionnaire
Because the SUBI positive affect was inversely correlated with the level of negative mood (Tonan et al, 1995), which can be measured by a mood state questionnaire, the positive correlation in our results is concomitant with the reported significant negative correlation between verbal working memory (VWM) task-related prefrontal cortex (PFC) activities and premorbid levels of negative mood at the left DLPFC (Aoki et al, 2011)
Summary
Identification of modifiable social risk factors across the lifespan and the promotion of prevention are topics of interest in the field of global mental health (Collins et al, 2011). Modification of problematic working environments can be made available for workers, and it was officially announced that workers in stressful environments should be aware of their stress level and enhance their stress coping mechanisms and mental resilience (Kawakami and Tsutsumi, 2016). Factors that promote resilience and prevent mental disorders in persons at extreme social disadvantage remain to be fully elucidated, and no biological risk factor or marker has been validated for clinical use across the lifespan (Collins et al, 2011). Because many lifestyle-related attitudes and habits can be formed in late adolescence and assessing well-being may be beneficial in predicting future depression risk (Sawyer et al, 2012; Grant et al, 2013), neurological findings associated with lifestyle habits and states of subjective well-being in university students may provide an important foundation for future investigations
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