Wei Dongyue, Xue Jiajie, Sun Bingbing
College of Chinese Studies and Foreign Languages, Yantai Nanshan University, Yantai, China.
Front Psychol. 2025 Aug 29;16:1636707. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1636707. eCollection 2025.
This study advances current understanding by systematically investigating how team vs. individual sports differentially influence adolescent psychological resilience through emotion regulation, social support, and self-efficacy pathways, with particular attention to gender moderation effects.
Drawing on multi-wave data from 698 Chinese adolescents (aged 12-18 years), we implemented a mediation model featuring two distinct pathways to elucidate mechanisms unique to each sport type. Hierarchical regression and bootstrapped analyses were utilized to evaluate: (1) the unique mediating contributions of emotion regulation (ER), social support (SS), and self-efficacy (SE) across sport categories, and (2) the moderating influence of gender on these pathways.
(1) Team sports significantly enhance adolescents' levels of social support while individual sports notably improve self-efficacy; both types of exercise positively predict psychological resilience. (2) Emotional regulation, social support, and self-efficacy play significant mediating roles between physical activity and psychological resilience. Specifically, team sports primarily influence psychological resilience by enhancing social support and subsequently boosting self-efficacy; conversely, individual sports mainly strengthen psychological resilience through increased self-efficacy. (3) Gender has a significant moderating effect within team sports; specifically, Female exhibit a stronger impact of emotional regulation on psychological resilience compared to male who demonstrate more pronounced benefits from enhanced self-efficacy regarding their psychological resilience. In contrast to team sports, gender significantly moderated the social support-resilience relationship in individual sports, with stronger associations observed for female.
Our findings demonstrate that sport types function as gendered ecological niches for resilience cultivation. Specifically, team settings leverage interpersonal dynamics to enhance male self-efficacy and Female emotional competencies, while individual activities offer equitable platforms for social support development. These insights contest uniform exercise recommendations and furnish a blueprint for tailored, gender-sensitive interventions grounded in sport participation.
本研究通过系统调查团队运动与个人运动如何通过情绪调节、社会支持和自我效能途径对青少年心理韧性产生不同影响，尤其关注性别调节效应，以推进当前的理解。
利用来自698名中国青少年（12 - 18岁）的多波数据，我们实施了一个中介模型，该模型具有两条不同途径，以阐明每种运动类型独有的机制。采用分层回归和自抽样分析来评估：（1）情绪调节（ER）、社会支持（SS）和自我效能（SE）在不同运动类别中的独特中介作用，以及（2）性别对这些途径的调节影响。
（1）团队运动显著提高青少年的社会支持水平，而个人运动显著提高自我效能；两种运动类型都能正向预测心理韧性。（2）情绪调节、社会支持和自我效能在体育活动与心理韧性之间起显著中介作用。具体而言，团队运动主要通过增强社会支持并随后提高自我效能来影响心理韧性；相反，个人运动主要通过提高自我效能来增强心理韧性。（3）性别在团队运动中具有显著调节作用；具体而言，与男性相比，女性在情绪调节对心理韧性的影响方面表现更强，而男性在心理韧性方面从增强自我效能中获得的益处更明显。与团队运动不同，性别在个人运动中对社会支持 - 韧性关系有显著调节作用，女性的关联更强。
我们的研究结果表明，运动类型作为培养韧性的性别化生态位发挥作用。具体而言，团队环境利用人际动态来提高男性自我效能和女性情绪能力，而个人活动为社会支持发展提供公平平台。这些见解对统一的运动建议提出了挑战，并为基于运动参与的针对性、性别敏感干预提供了蓝图。
