Xiuhan Zhao

Background: Multimorbidity imposes a substantial burden on older populations, yet research neglects how physical activity (PA) relates to severe disease burden in established cases. Moreover, the efficacy of combining low-cost PA assessments with routine indicators to identify high-burden patients in resource-constrained settings remains unclear. This study explores associations between PA levels and severe multimorbidity (≥4 conditions), evaluating PA’s utility for auxiliary status identification via interpretable machine learning. Methods: This cross-sectional study included the CHARLS 2018 sample (n = 10,130) and a supplementary community sample (n = 315). Multivariable logistic regression evaluated associations between PA and severe multimorbidity. An XGBoost model assessed routine indicators’ classification performance, utilizing SHAP values to analyze feature contributions to the model. Results: PA was inversely associated with severe multimorbidity specifically among those meeting the WHO criteria (MPA > 300 or VPA > 150 min/week) for additional health benefits (OR = 0.80, 95% CI: 0.73–0.88, p < 0.001), especially in adults ≥60 years. Although models using solely routine indicators showed modest discrimination (AUC = 0.673), SHAP analysis revealed PA as the foremost modifiable behavioral feature in classification, with local patterns aligning closely with regression findings. Conclusions: Among middle-aged and older adults with multimorbidity, PA levels exhibit significant categorical associations with severe multimorbidity. In community management, low-cost PA evaluation serves as an auxiliary indicator to preliminarily classify high-burden individuals. Given potential reverse causality, future longitudinal cohorts are required to clarify causal relationships, providing direct evidence for daily activity management.

Background: Problematic smartphone use has increasingly become the focus of attention in recent years. Although it has been noted that parental psychological control is significantly correlated with teenagers’ social anxiety and problematic smartphone use, little is known about how these factors may interact with college students. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether social anxiety mediates the association between parental psychological control and problematic smartphone use. Methods: a total of 534 Chinese college students aged 17–25 years (male 59.0%, female 41.0%) participated in the study (M = 20.40, SD = 1.72). The Parental Psychological Control questionnaire, the Social Phobia Inventory, and the Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale were used to evaluate parental psychological control, social anxiety, and problematic smartphone use, respectively. Data were analyzed using the Pearson correlation analysis, regression analysis, and mediation analysis. Results: the results showed that (1) social anxiety was positively correlated with problematic smartphone use among college students, (2) parental psychological control has a significant correlation with college students’ social anxiety, (3) college students’ social anxiety was positively related with problematic smartphone use, and (4) social anxiety plays a mediation role in the association between parental psychological control and problematic smartphone use. Conclusions: in conclusion, social anxiety plays a mediating role in the relationship between parental psychological control and problematic smartphone use, and reducing parental psychological control is an effective intervention means to directly or indirectly reduce college students’ problematic smartphone use. In addition, attention should be paid to parenting styles, and measures should be taken to increase social interaction among college students so as to reduce their problematic smartphone use.

Psychological issues have a complex and multidimensional impact on a college athlete’s training and performance. As the reserve talent of competitive sports, it is very important to investigate the psychological health of athletes. This study aims to explore the association between generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), basic psychological needs (BPN), and mental health (MH) among Chinese college athletes. Chinese college athletes who were willing to participate in the study, had participated in national competitions, and had a Chinese athlete rating certificate were included in this study. Participants completed the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), and the Basic Needs Satisfaction in General Scale (BNSG-S). The study involved 665 college athletes (415 males and 250 females), with an average age of 20.43 years (SD = 1.68). We performed descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, and moderated chain mediation analyses using SPSS 22.0 and Hayes’ PROCESS macro. The results of the final model showed that basic psychological needs were positively correlated with mental health (r = 0.443, p < 0.001), while PTSD (r = −0.346, p < 0.001) and generalized anxiety disorder (r = −0.527, p < 0.001) were negatively correlated with mental health among college athletes. There were significant indirect impacts. According to the bootstrapping results, basic psychological needs and generalized anxiety disorder played a mediating role in 22.54% and 50.29% of the total effects of PTSD on mental health, respectively. Meanwhile, the chain mediating effect of basic psychological needs and generalized anxiety disorder (7.23%) was also significant. The study’s findings advance our understanding of the connections between PTSD and mental health and highlight the significant roles played by basic psychological needs and generalized anxiety disorder in that link among Chinese college athletes.

With the acceleration of the socialist modernization process, people’s living standards continue to improve, and the modernization of cities is also developing rapidly. In the process of urban construction, a series of problems such as how to deal with the relationship between citizens and the surrounding environment, how to carry out citizens' health activities, and how to organize citizens to exercise healthily are becoming more and more obvious. With the introduction of the National Sports Outline, as an important sports activity, Chinese martial arts has a long history and profound cultural heritage, and it still plays an irreplaceable role in promoting the national spirit and building a harmonious society today. Therefore, this paper introduced the LSTM recurrent neural network algorithm to collect and extract the current data on martial arts fitness in the pursuit of health. By constructing the LSTM neuron structure and building the LSTM recurrent neural network structure, a state estimation based on LSTM feature extraction was proposed. The algorithm used the memory ability of LSTM to extract the relevant features of the data stream, which significantly improved the accuracy of the data stream collection. The experimental results showed that the time required by the method in this paper were 12.7, 10.2, 12.4 s and 11.8 min respectively, and the accuracy rates were 98.78, 98.26, 99.03 and 97.89%, respectively, which were greatly improved compared with the existing methods.

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 poses a significant threat to mental health, which may lead to psychological stress in a number of individuals. Athlete burnout is a common psychological phenomenon that has a negative influence on their sports career. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between psychological distress and athletic burnout among Chinese college football athletes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the mediating role of basic psychological needs, anxiety and mental pressure. In an online cross-sectional survey conducted in February 2022, the team coaches sent an electronic questionnaire to college football athletes. Participants completed questionnaires on relevant variables. Pearson correlation analysis and mediation effect analysis were carried out by using SPSS software and its plug-in process V3.3. The study included 672 participants and the results showed that: (1) psychological distress, basic psychological needs, anxiety, mental pressure and athletic burnout were significantly pairwise correlated, (2) mental pressure, anxiety and basic psychological needs play a mediating role between psychological distress and athletic burnout respectively, and (3) basic psychological needs and anxiety, basic psychological needs and mental pressure, anxiety and mental pressure, as well as mental pressure, anxiety and basic psychological needs respectively play a chain mediating role between psychological distress and athletic burnout. In conclusion, psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic is an important factor leading to athletic burnout among Chinese college football athletes and may further affect the level of athletic burnout through basic psychological needs, anxiety and mental pressure. The government and schools should strengthen the recognition of these factors in order to improve the situation of athletic burnout among Chinese college football athletes.

The issue of mental health among college students is of increasing concern during the COVID-19 outbreak. Since course characteristics of engineering college students determine the particularities of their mental health, the specific objectives of this study were: (1) to analyze the relationship between physical activity, parental psychological control, basic psychological needs, anxiety, and mental health in Chinese engineering college students during COVID-19 pandemic; and (2) to examine the mediation effect of anxiety between the relationship of basic psychological needs and mental health. A cross-sectional study was conducted among several universities in Shandong Province, China. We randomly selected 254 Chinese engineering college students from these colleges. Participants who were given questionnaires completed the Physical Activity Rating Scale (PARS-3), Basic Needs Satisfaction in General Scale (BNSG-S), Parental psychological control Questionnaire, the Beck anxiety inventory (BAI), and the Kessler 10 (K10) scale. The mediation model was conducted to assess the mediation effect of anxiety between the relationship of basic psychological needs and mental health. Among 254 Chinese college students majoring in engineering, the results showed that their mental health was in the mid-level range. Besides, physical activity and basic psychological needs is positively correlated with mental health, respectively, while parental psychological control is not correlated with mental health. Anxiety is negatively associated with mental health. Mediation analysis revealed that anxiety played a mediation role in the relationship between basic psychological needs and mental health. In conclusion, mental health of Chinese engineering college students deserves extensive attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proper intervention on physical activity, basic psychological needs, and anxiety may be beneficial to improve their mental health. In addition, meeting basic psychological needs is beneficial to reduce anxiety and improve mental health further.