The authors tested the hypothesis that individuals with a variety of severe chronic illnesses and the healthy elderly exhibit a loss of flexibility in their response to a variety of stressors, compared with healthy adults. A card sort game designed to assess self-reported coping behavior under different stressful life situations was used to compare healthy adults with individuals with multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and the elderly. The healthy adults were found to exhibit more variability than any of the illness groups or the elderly.
Healthy function is marked by a complex type of variability.
A major unresolved problem in behavioral medicine is defining the relationship between coping ability and health in the individual. One way to quantify the inherently variable nature of coping behavior would be to measure it frequently over a sustained period. However, this approach is costly and unfeasible. An alternative strategy, which we adopted for this study, is to develop a simple test to evaluate the plasticity of self-reported coping behavior in different contexts. The notion that certain types of behavioral variability indicate healthy functioning is consistent with recent applications of nonlinear dynamics to physiology and medicine.