The Relationship between Exercise Behavior and Mental Health during the COVID-19 Epidemic: Research Based on the Weibo Exercise Behavior User Dictionary

ABSTRACT

In the context of COVID-19, people face conditions of great stress and are susceptible to negative emotions such as worry, fear, and doubt. Therefore, the focus of epidemic prevention should be on mental health as well as physical health. It is important to pay attention to people's mental health while mitigating and controlling the epidemic. As an intervention to improve mental health, exercise behavior has attracted increasing attention from scholars due to its convenience and low cost. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to investigate the differences between characteristics related to linguistic expression and mental health indicators among different groups of Weibo users by constructing a Weibo exercise behavior user lexicon to explore the influence of exercise behavior on mental health. This study developed a user dictionary of exercise behavior, classified Sina Weibo users' exercise behavior, and established relevant systems to uncover the expressive characteristics of psychological vocabulary and behavioral vocabulary to explore the differences in expressive features related to psychological and behavioral vocabulary and mental health indicators among users who engage in different forms of exercise behavior during the period of COVID-19. As a result of an analysis of variance (ANOVA) conducted during the COVID-19 epidemic, (1) based on the constructed user lexicon of motion behavior in Weibo, the classification program exhibited good performance;(2) there were significant differences in the expressions of some lexical features among users who exhibited different motor behaviors;and (3) both nonphysical exercise and physical exercise behavior had positive relationships with some mental health indicators, but the mechanism associated with nonphysical exercise requires further exploration. This study provides a scientific online evaluation methodology and support for research concerning exercise and mental health during the COVID-19 epidemic.