体育锻炼与大学生手机成瘾：负性情绪与应对方式的链式中介

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Addictive Behaviors

• Xidian University, Xi'an, China

Abstract

Background:Considering the significant risks that widespread mobile phone addiction poses to the holistic health of college students, further research is essential. This article systematically explores correlational mechanisms linking physical exercise engagement to mobile phone addiction. Furthermore, it evaluates how Negative Emotions and Coping Styles function as mediators in this relationship. Methods:A convenience sampling approach was employed to recruit 3,283 undergraduates across the first three years of college. Data collection took place between April and May 2025, during which participants self-reported their engagement in physical exercise, problematic mobile phone use patterns, psychological distress (manifested as depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms), as well as their preferred coping styles. All responses were gathered through the Wenjuanxing online survey platform. For the statistical analysis, SPSS 29.0 was utilized to compute descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations. Furthermore, to evaluate the sequential mediation effect, we adopted Hayes' PROCESS macro (version 4.1, Model 6), implementing a bootstrapping approach with 5,000 iterations to generate bias-corrected confidence intervals for the indirect pathways. Results: Students showed low physical exercise (M=18.49±14.90) and variable mobile phone addiction (M=35.40±14.78). Physical exercise negatively correlated with addiction (r=-0.83), negative emotions (r=-0.39), and negative coping styles(r=-0.39), but positively with positive coping (r=0.31). Negative emotions positively predicted addiction (r=0.618). Mediation analysis showed physical exercise exhibited a correlational link with lower addiction levels(direct effect=21.54%) through three distinct indirect correlational pathways. The path through negative emotions was dominant (72.45%), while coping-related paths accounted for 1.41%–4.6%.The independent mediating contribution of positive coping styles was slightly larger than that of negative coping styles; the dominant explanatory power across both models stemmed from the pathway of negative emotions. Conclusions:Correlational results preliminarily suggest that physical exercise may be negatively associated with college students' mobile phone addiction through correlational pathways including sequential serial paths involving negative emotions and two types of coping styles.The present correlational data could provide empirical reference for developing sports-based mental health interventions.

Keywords

chain mediators, college students, Coping styles, Negative emotions, physical exercise

Received

10 July 2026

Accepted

25 September 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Shuwen, Tong, Zhou, Wang, Shen and Meng. 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: ShuQiao Meng

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