Spirituality predicts ability to "get in the zone" while neuro-exergaming among older adults

Spirituality is a topic of growing interest among scientists: in the last 30 years, the amount of publications addressing spirituality, religiosity, and health has increased by 688% (Weaver et al., 2006). One’s capacity for spirituality, a striving for a connection with oneself, nature, and the transcendent, is argued to give rise to spiritual or meditative experiences, accompanied by broad neural activation and state of interconnection of thoughts, memories, and emotions (Wildman, 2012). In this study, we examined the relationship between spirituality and meditative experiences by analyzing data derived from the study on the role of flow in older adults engaging in physical and cognitive exercise interventions (Warren, 2015). Spirituality was measured by two domains of the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS): “daily spiritual experiences” and “meaning,” while experience of “getting in the zone” was measured by one’s report of being in a flow state, defined as a full immersion into an activity, using a short version of the Flow Scale. Over a period of months, participants had multiple cybercycle exercise sessions in one of the three conditions: the tour only, the cybercycle, and the game only condition. The flow questionnaires were filled out post-single bouts and monthly, and the spirituality questionnaire was filled out once at baseline. Preliminary analysis of our data indicated that higher scores on daily spiritual experiences and meaning subscales of the BMMRS were positively correlated with the total flow scores. Further, we will conduct exploratory analysis to look into possible mediator variables, over time flow scores, and the score differences between individuals with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), as well as deeply religious and nonreligious participants.