Flexibility is a key feature of psychological health, allowing the individual to dynamically adapt to changing environmental demands, which is impaired in many psychiatric disorders like obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Adequately responding to varying demands requires the brain to switch between different patterns of neural activity, which are represented by different brain network configurations (functional connectivity patterns). Here, we operationalize neural flexibility as the dissimilarity between consecutive connectivity matrices of brain regions (jump length). In total, 132 fMRI scans were obtained from 17 patients that were scanned four to five times during inpatient psychotherapy, and from 17 controls that were scanned at comparable time intervals. Significant negative correlations were found between the jump lengths and the symptom severity scores of OCD, depression, anxiety, and stress, suggesting that high symptom severity corresponds to inflexible brain functioning. Further analyses revealed that impaired reconfiguration (pattern stability) of the brain seems to be more related to general psychiatric impairment rather than to specific symptoms, e.g., of OCD or depression. Importantly, the group × time interaction of a repeated measures ANOVA was significant, as well as the post-hoc paired t-tests of the patients (first vs. last scan). The results suggest that psychotherapy is able to significantly increase the neural flexibility of patients. We conclude that psychiatric symptoms like anxiety, stress, depression, and OCD are associated with an impaired adaptivity of the brain. In general, our results add to the growing evidence that dynamic functional connectivity captures meaningful properties of brain functioning.

灵活性是心理健康的一个关键特征，它使个人能够动态地适应不断变化的环境需求，这在许多精神疾病中受到损害，如强迫症 (OCD)。充分响应不同的需求需要大脑在不同的神经活动模式之间切换，这些模式由不同的大脑网络配置（功能连接模式）表示。在这里，我们将神经灵活性操作化为dis大脑区域的连续连接矩阵之间的相似性（跳跃长度）。总共有 132 次 fMRI 扫描来自 17 名在住院心理治疗期间被扫描 4 到 5 次的患者，以及 17 名以可比时间间隔进行扫描的对照。跳跃长度与强迫症、抑郁、焦虑和压力的症状严重程度评分之间存在显着的负相关，表明高症状严重程度对应于不灵活的大脑功能。进一步的分析表明，大脑重构受损（模式稳定性）似乎与一般精神障碍更相关，而不是与特定症状相关，例如强迫症或抑郁症。重要的是，组×时间重复测量方差分析的相互作用是显着的，以及患者的事后配对t检验（第一次与最后一次扫描）。结果表明，心理治疗能够显着提高患者的神经灵活性。我们得出结论，焦虑、压力、抑郁和强迫症等精神症状与大脑适应性受损有关。总的来说，我们的结果增加了越来越多的证据，即动态功能连接捕获了大脑功能的有意义的特性。