Physical activity and its impact on mental health during the late adolescent and emerging adulthood period: A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Late adolescence and emerging adulthood is an important period for the onset of mental health problems and significant declines in physical activity (PA). While the relationship between PA and mental health is fairly established, results from previous reviews and meta-analyses are largely based on studies with other populations. We conducted a systematic review of 22 studies to examine the relationship between PA and specific mental health outcomes of anxiety, depressive symptoms, and perceived stress during late adolescence/emerging adulthood. Methods: Studies were selected if they included: (a) intervention/measure of PA; (b) outcome(s) of depressive symptoms, anxiety, or perceived stress; (c) mean sample age of 15-25; (d) non-clinical populations; and (e) longitudinal/experimental design. Results: Studies included: 8 acute PA interventions, 12 longer-term PA interventions, and two with an observational design. Quality assessment indicated 10 studies were of poor quality, 10 moderate, and two strong. Results found 83% (10/12) of studies examining depressive symptoms, 57% (8/14) anxiety, and 50% (3/6) perceived stress had a significant inverse relationship between PA and mental health outcome, meaning higher levels of PA or the PA intervention were associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and perceived stress. Conclusions: Findings from this review are encouraging but not unequivocal. While PA appears to have a positive impact on depressive symptoms, the role of PA on anxiety and perceived stress are less clear. Future high quality studies, particularly with observational designs, are needed to better understand the impact of PA on mental health outcomes during this broader transition period.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".