Abstract
BackgroundPhysical activity is associated with reduced depression in youth and adults. However, our understanding of how different aspects of youth activities—specifically, the degree to which they are social, team-oriented, and physical—relate to mental health in children is less clear.MethodsHere we use a data-driven approach to characterize the degree to which physical and non-physical youth activities are social and team-oriented. We then examine the relationship between depressive symptoms and participation in different clusters of youth activities using mixed effect models and causal mediation analyses in 11,875 children from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. We test our hypotheses in an original sample (n = 4520, NDA release 1.1) and replication sample of participants (n = 7355, NDA release 2.0.1).ResultsWe show and replicate that social–physical activities are associated with lower depressive symptoms. Next, we demonstrate that social connections, measured by number of close friends, partially mediate the association between social–physical activities and lower depressive symptoms.ConclusionsOur results provide a rubric for using data-driven techniques to investigate different aspects of youth activities and highlight the social dynamics of physical activities as a possible protective factor against depression in childhood.
Highlights
Physical activity is associated with reduced depression in youth and adults
We evaluate associations between caregiver-reports of youth activities assessed with the Sports Activities Involvement Questionnaire (SAIQ) and youth internalizing symptoms assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) using data from the first release (NIMH Data Archive (NDA) Release 1.1, https://doi.org/10.15154/1412097) of Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study (ABCD Study®) data (n = 4520 children ages 9 and 10)
We restricted our sample to adults who had more than a 75% Human Intelligence Task (HIT; the term for tasks completed on Mechanical Turk (MTurk)) approval rate and who had completed more than 50 HITs
Summary
Our understand‐ ing of how different aspects of youth activities—the degree to which they are social, team-oriented, and physical—relate to mental health in children is less clear. Physical activity is associated with decreases in symptoms of depression and anxiety in adults [5, 21, 34, 66], increases in neurocognitive performance in older adults [48], and improved mental health and self-esteem in children and adolescents [11, 16, 35, 42, 46, 49, 71, 76].
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