ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
The Mediating Role of Sleep Quality and the Moderating Role of Gender and Grade in the Association Between Academic Stress and Psychological Health Among Adolescents in County-Level Areas of Liaoning Province, China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Anshan Normal University, Anshan, China
- 2Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
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This study examined how academic stress is associated with psychological health among adolescents in county-level areas of Liaoning Province, China, and tested whether sleep quality mediates this association while gender and grade moderate key pathways. A total of 449 students from Grades 7–9 completed validated measures of academic stress, sleep quality (PSQI), and psychological health. Mediation and moderated mediation analyses were conducted using PROCESS (Model 4 and Model 22) with 5,000 bootstrap samples.Academic stress was positively associated with sleep problems (r = .446, p < .01) and psychological health problems (r = .584, p < .01), while sleep quality showed a strong association with psychological health (r = .699, p < .01). Sleep quality partially mediated the association between academic stress and psychological health (β = .55, p < .001; 95% CI [0.506, 0.920]). Grade significantly moderated the stress–health link, with stronger associations observed in Grades 8 and 9 than in Grade 7 (B = −0.60, p < .05). Gender moderated the relationship between sleep quality and psychological health (B = −1.59, p < .05), indicating a stronger association for females.
Keywords: Academic stress, adolescents, County-LevelAreas, psychological health, sleep quality
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 06 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wenyan, Wang and Zhang. 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: Jingmiao Zhang
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