Meeting 24-h movement behavior guidelines is linked to academic engagement, psychological functioning, and cognitive difficulties in youth with internalizing problems.

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to investigate associations of meeting 24-h movement behavior (24-HMB: physical activity [PA], screen time [ST] in the school-aged youth, and sleep) guidelines with indicators of academic engagement, psychological functioning, and cognitive function in a national representative sample of U.S. youth. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, 1794 participants aged 6 to 17 years old were included for multivariable logistic regression to determine the above-mentioned associations, while adjusting for sociodemographic and health covariates. RESULTS: The proportion of participants who met 24-HMB guideline(s) varied greatly (PA+ ST+ sleep = 34 [weighted 1.17 %], PA + ST = 23 [weighted 1.72 %], PA + sleep = 52 [weighted 2.15 %], PA = 34 [weighted 2.88 %], ST = 142 [weighted 7.5 %], ST+ sleep = 209 [weighted 11.86 %], sleep = 725 [weighted 35.5 %], none = 575 [weighted 37.22 %]). Participants who met ST guideline alone and integrated (ST + Sleep and ST + sleep + PA) guidelines demonstrated the consistently beneficial associations with learning interest/curiosity, caring for school performance, completing required homework, resilience, cognitive difficulties, self-regulation (ps < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Meeting 24-HMB guidelines in an isolated or integrative manner was associated with improved academic engagement, psychological functioning, and reduced cognitive difficulties. These findings highlight the importance of the promotion of 24-HMB guidelines in youth with internalizing problems. Future longitudinal studies are needed to investigate whether changes or modifications of meeting specific 24-HMB guidelines (especially ST) is beneficial for youth with internalizing problems.

We know what we know, but from whom did we learn it? A sociodemographic history of participant characteristics and reporting practices in sport and exercise psychology.

The majority of research participants in the social sciences are recruited from populations that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. This has the potential to threaten the external validity and limit the generalizability of research findings. It also highlights the need to provide a historical accounting of participant characteristics and reporting practices across coherent disciplines of research. This paper reports the participant characteristics from studies published in 12 leading journals in the sport and exercise psychology literature. In total, 15,650 peer-reviewed articles were published across these outlets from 1930 to 2021, involving 4,487,437 human participants. A descriptive overview of participant characteristics and reporting practices suggests that empirical understanding of human experiences and outcomes in sport and exercise settings is built from an incomplete and unrepresentative sample of participants. Findings illuminate potential knowledge gaps that may have resulted from the lack of diverse samples and offer potential paths forward for contemporary sport and exercise psychology scholars who wish to address these gaps.

The effect of acute exercise for reducing cognitive alterations associated with individuals high in anxiety.

Single bouts of exercise have been observed to exhibit therapeutic benefits for reducing affective responses associated with anxiety. However, anxiety has also been found to relate to less efficient cognitive processing as well as a greater reliance on action monitoring processes. Given the extant body of evidence demonstrating that single bouts of exercise result in cognitive enhancements; the present investigation sought to determine the extent to which exercise might be effective at reducing these anxiety-related impairments in cognition. Using a randomized within-subjects crossover design in a sample of high-anxious and low-anxious college-aged adults, measures of inhibition, attention, and action monitoring were assessed before and after 20-min of either aerobic exercise or a cognitively engaging control condition during two separate, counterbalanced sessions. Findings from this investigation revealed that both high anxious and low anxious individuals exhibited enhancements in behavioral indices of performance on an inhibitory control task with faster and more accurate responses following 20 min of moderate intensity aerobic exercise. Additionally, both high anxious and low anxious individuals demonstrated exercise induced enhancements in the allocation of attentional resources (as indexed by P3 amplitude) as well as action monitoring (as indexed by ERN amplitude). Accordingly, these findings provide evidence consistent with broad-base claims regarding the benefits of exercise, suggesting that both high and low anxious individuals appear to incur cognitive benefits.

Does Walking Mitigate Affective and Cognitive Responses to Social Exclusion?

Social exclusion can produce harmful affective and cognitive responses that undermine healthy functioning. Physical activity is known to have acute affective and cognitive effects that are adaptive and therefore may mitigate these responses. The purpose of this study was to assess walking as a strategy to reduce the effects of social exclusion on affect and working memory performance. Healthy female college students (N = 96, Mage = 19.2 ± 0.8 years) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: (a) sedentary plus neutral feedback, (b) sedentary plus exclusion feedback, (c) walking plus neutral feedback, or (d) walking plus exclusion feedback. Pre- and postactivity and pre- and postfeedback measures of affect and working memory performance were recorded. Excluded participants had a significant negative shift in affect following feedback, p < .05. Those who were sedentary prior to exclusion had lower affect scores following exclusion than the walking plus exclusion and neutral feedback conditions, p < .05. There were no direct effects of walking or social exclusion on working memory. However, perceptions of being ignored predicted smaller improvements in working memory performance for participants who were sedentary prior to exclusion, p < .05. The findings suggest that walking prior to social exclusion may mitigate the affective response to social exclusion as well as social perceptions that can undermine working memory. More broadly, this work supports continued examination of physical activity as a potential strategy for helping individuals cope with negative social experiences.

Aerobic Fitness and Inhibition in Young Children: Moderating Roles of ADHD Status and Age.

We examined the relation between aerobic fitness and inhibition in young children with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-risk status. Participants (91 ADHD risk, 107 typically developing, Mage = 6.83, 53.5% male, 68.2% Caucasian) completed an assessment of aerobic fitness and a flanker task requiring variable amounts of inhibitory control. Aerobic fitness was positively associated with inhibition. When inhibitory control demands were largest, the relation varied as a function of ADHD-risk status such that the link between aerobic fitness and inhibition was significant only for children with ADHD risk. The relation between aerobic fitness, status, and inhibition was further moderated by age for interference control. Specifically, the positive relation between aerobic fitness and interference control was only significant for younger children with ADHD risk. A fitness-cognition link appears in young childhood that seems particularly salient for those in the earliest school years with ADHD risk. The findings extend work on typically developing children and suggest that exploring aerobic fitness interventions to address executive function impairments in children at risk for ADHD is warranted.