ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1628586
This article is part of the Research TopicTowards a Psychophysiological Approach in Physical Activity, Exercise, and Sports-Volume VView all 4 articles
The Relationship Between Physical Activity and Internet Addiction among Chinese Adolescents: Exploring Latent Profile Analysis and Multi-Level Mediating Mechanisms
Provisionally accepted
- Shandong Sport University, Jinan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
In recent years, adolescent Internet addiction has emerged as a pressing concern, undermining young people's psychological well-being and social functioning. Although regular physical activity is known to bolster adolescents' mental health, its direct and indirect protective effects against Internet addiction-and the psychosocial processes involved-remain insufficiently understood, particularly in terms of how these effects differ across subgroups identified via latent profile analysis. Given this, the present study, employing structural equation modeling (SEM), delineated the factor structures and predictive relationships among physical activity, family cohesion, prosocial behavior, and Internet addiction. Moreover, to investigate how these pathways vary across different user groups, we conducted latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify distinct Internet-use typologies and tested their Mediation effects. The measurement model supported adequate construct validity and internal consistency across all latent variables, ensuring the reliability of subsequent structural analyses. SEM results demonstrated that physical activity exerted a significant negative direct effect on Internet addiction (β = -0.227, p < 0.001), and indirect effects via family cohesion (-0.065, 15.7% of total effect) and prosocial behavior (-0.083, 19.9% of total effect), as well as a chained pathway from family cohesion to prosocial behavior (-0.043, 10.1% of total effect). LPA supported a three-class solution-Functional Use (31.2%), At-Risk Use (49.5%), and Addicted Use (19.3%)-and multi-group SEM indicated that the magnitude of both indirect pathways varied across these typologies, with the strongest mediation observed in the At-Risk group. These findings suggest that physical activity is associated with reduced adolescent Internet addiction both directly and indirectly through socio-psychological mechanisms, and that intervention efforts should be tailored to specific user typologies to maximize preventive and remedial impact.These findings suggest that school-based physical activity interventions may help mitigate Internet addiction among Chinese adolescents.
Keywords: Internet addiction, physical activity, Family cohesion, Prosocial Behavior, latent profile analysis
Received: 14 May 2025; Accepted: 19 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhu, Meng, Zhang and Yuan. 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: Xiaotong Yuan, Shandong Sport University, Jinan, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.