体育舞蹈运动处方联合团体心理辅导对大学生社交焦虑的干预：一项随机对照试验

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Sport Psychology

Abstract

Objective: This randomized controlled trial (RCT) was designed to evaluate the relative efficacy of a structured dancesport exercise prescription, group psychological counselling, and their combined application in reducing social anxiety symptoms among Chinese university students. Methods: Forty-eight university students with elevated social anxiety were recruited from the Dancesport Club of Hefei Normal University and randomly allocated to four parallel groups (n = 12 per group): a Dancesport Exercise Prescription group (DP), a Group Psychological Counselling group (GC), a Combined Intervention group (DP-GC), and a no-intervention control group. Social anxiety and related psychological symptoms were assessed before and after the 12-week intervention using the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90), the Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS), the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SAD), and the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS). Group differences over time were examined using a 4 × 2 Group × Time repeated-measures framework, supplemented by adjusted post hoc comparisons, effect-size estimates, and 95% confidence intervals. Results: The three active intervention conditions showed greater pre-to-post reductions in social anxiety-related outcomes than the control condition. The combined DP-GC group showed the largest improvement across the measured outcomes. However, because the combined condition integrated two intervention components within the same scheduled sessions and the sample size was small, the observed advantage is interpreted cautiously as a potential additive benefit rather than definitive evidence of a true synergistic interaction. Conclusions: Dancesport exercise prescription and group psychological counselling may each reduce social anxiety symptoms among college students, with complementary scale-specific effects. The combined intervention model appears promising, but its superiority should be interpreted cautiously in light of the integrated intervention design, small sample size, and reliance on self-report outcomes.

Keywords

Dance Therapy, Exercise Therapy, Psychotherapy, randomized controlled trial, Social Anxiety Disorder

Received

13 April 2026

Accepted

28 September 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Mengmeng, Jie, Dan, Shunli, Weikai and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence:

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