ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Children and Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1663388
This article is part of the Research TopicChild and Elder Abuse: A Public Health IssueView all articles
Gender and Depression: Dual Pathways Influencing Adolescents' Physical Activity and Psychological Well-Being
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China
- 2Guizhou Education University, Guiyang, China
- 3Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Malaysia
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Objectives: This study investigates the influence of gender and depression on physical activity (PA) and psychological well-being among adolescents in Shanghai. Methods: A purposive offline survey conducted from June to December 2023 collected data from 416 participants (216 boys, 200 girls). This study employed SPSS software version 29 to conduct descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Results: The findings revealed a significant gender difference in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), with boys reporting higher levels than girls (ŋ² = 0.05). However, gender did not significantly affect psychological variables, including academic self-efficacy (ASE), mindfulness (MD), emotional intelligence (EI), self-esteem (SE), and social support (SS). Depression levels had a significant impact on all psychological variables, with students experiencing low depression scoring higher on ASE, MD, EI, SE, and SS compared to those with high depression (ŋ² = 0.11-0.25). Conversely, depression levels did not significantly influence MVPA. Conclusions: These results emphasized the critical role of addressing depression to improve adolescents' psychological well-being while highlighting the need for gender-specific interventions to encourage physical activity (PA).
Keywords: gender differences, Depression, physical activity, psychological well-being, adolescents
Received: 11 Jul 2025; Accepted: 26 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bai, Wu, Pang and Liu. 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: Xiaoming Liu, 202001163@hunnu.edu.cn
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