Introduction
Personnel engaged in high-stakes occupations, such as military personnel, law enforcement, and emergency first responders, must sustain performance through a range of environmental stressors. To maximize the effectiveness of military personnel, an a priori understanding of traits can help predict their physical and cognitive performance under stress and adversity. This work developed and assessed a suite of measures that have the potential to predict performance during operational scenarios. These measures were designed to characterize four specific trait–based domains: cognitive, health, physical, and social-emotional.
Materials and Methods
One hundred and ninety-one active duty U.S. Army soldiers completed interleaved questionnaire–based, seated task–based, and physical task–based measures over a period of 3-5 days. Redundancy analysis, dimensionality reduction, and network analyses revealed several patterns of interest.
Results
First, unique variable analysis revealed a minimally redundant battery of instruments. Second, principal component analysis showed that metrics tended to cluster together in three to five components within each domain. Finally, analyses of cross-domain associations using network analysis illustrated that cognitive, health, physical, and social-emotional domains showed strong construct solidarity.
Conclusions
The present battery of metrics presents a fieldable toolkit that may be used to predict operational performance that can be clustered into separate components or used independently. It will aid predictive algorithm development aimed to identify critical predictors of individual military personnel and small-unit performance outcomes.
RESULTS:The mean SPS score was 50.5 (±15.2). A majority of participants (77.5%) were classified as active. Most participants preferred to engage in moderate-intensity exercise (60.3%), preferred to exercise outdoors (46.9%), and preferred to exercise alone (61.3%). Increasing SPS was associated with an increased likelihood of being classified as insufficiently active/sedentary (p = .047; OR = 1.03; 95% CI: 1.00, 1.07). Increasing SPS was also associated with a decreased likelihood of preferring vigorous-intensity exercise (p = .017; OR = .95; 95% CI: .92, .99). SPS was not associated with other exercise-related preferences. CONCLUSION: Individuals who score higher in SPS may be less likely to exercise, and if they do exercise, they may prefer to avoid vigorous-intensity activities. More research is needed to:(1) examine additional factors associated with exercise among individuals with high SPS; (2) determine whether associations between SPS and exercise vary according to cardiorespiratory and/or muscular fitness; and (3) develop and evaluate exercise interventions for individuals high in SPS.
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