The research team, led by Yihang Du of Capital University of Physical Education and Sports together with colleagues at Wuhan Sports University and WLSA Shanghai School, measured each construct with validated instruments. Physical exercise was assessed with the Physical Activity Rating Scale-3, regulatory emotional self-efficacy with the Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale, social avoidance with the corresponding dimension of the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale, and social anxiety with the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents. All participants were junior high students, and the study received ethics approval from the Academic Committee of Capital University of Physical Education and Sports, with informed consent obtained from both the students and their guardians.

The correlational results were striking in their consistency. Social anxiety was negatively correlated with physical exercise, with a correlation coefficient of r = -0.320, and with regulatory emotional self-efficacy, at r = -0.330, both statistically significant at p < 0.001. In other words, students who exercised more and who felt more capable of regulating their emotions tended to report lower social anxiety. The strongest single correlate, however, was social avoidance: the correlation between social avoidance and social anxiety was r = 0.434, also highly significant. Students who actively steered away from social contact were markedly more likely to report the fear of scrutiny, embarrassment and negative judgment that defines social anxiety.

Correlations alone can be misleading, so the researchers went further. Using a two-step hierarchical multiple linear regression with HC3 robust standard errors, a technique that guards against distortion from outliers and heteroscedasticity in survey data, they adjusted for sex, grade and household registration. Even after these adjustments, physical exercise retained a negative association with social anxiety (β = -0.174, p < 0.001), as did regulatory emotional self-efficacy (β = -0.182, p < 0.001), while social avoidance remained positively associated (β = 0.322, p < 0.001). Together, the final model explained 26.6 percent of the variance in social anxiety scores, a substantial share for a single model in psychological survey research and a sign that these three factors capture a meaningful portion of what differentiates anxious from less anxious students.

One of the study’s most technically interesting contributions is its decomposition of regulatory emotional self-efficacy into subcomponents. The construct, rooted in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, refers not to emotional regulation itself but to a person’s belief in their own capacity to regulate emotions. The researchers found that perceived efficacy in managing despondency or distress and perceived efficacy in managing anger or irritation were both negatively associated with social anxiety. Perceived efficacy in expressing positive affect, by contrast, was not independently significant once the other factors were accounted for. This asymmetry suggests that what matters for socially anxious adolescents is not general emotional confidence but specifically the belief that one can contain and manage negative emotional states in the moment they arise.

The team also subjected its findings to robustness checks designed to test whether the results were artifacts of particular statistical choices. When the researchers log-transformed the physical exercise variable to reduce skew, and when they excluded potentially influential observations from the analysis, the directions of the main associations were unchanged. In a supplementary analysis using an alternative outcome measure, social avoidance remained associated with fear of negative evaluation, one of the core cognitive components of social anxiety. These checks do not prove causation, which no cross-sectional design can, but they strengthen confidence that the reported associations are not fragile statistical accidents.

The causal question deserves emphasis. Because the data were collected at a single point in time, the study cannot determine whether low exercise and low emotional self-efficacy contribute to social anxiety, whether socially anxious students withdraw from exercise and lose confidence in their emotional coping, or whether some third factor drives all three. Each direction is plausible. Exercise is known to reduce physiological arousal and improve mood, which could buffer against social fear. Conversely, a student terrified of being watched may quit team sports, gym class and playground activity, eroding both fitness and opportunities for positive social feedback. Similarly, repeated failures to manage distress in social situations could erode regulatory self-efficacy, while strong self-efficacy could make social challenges feel manageable rather than threatening.

What the design does establish is that these factors are independently associated with social anxiety even after controlling for demographic characteristics, and that they are not simply proxies for one another. The fact that physical exercise, emotional self-efficacy and social avoidance each contributed uniquely to the regression model indicates that social anxiety in this population sits at the intersection of behavior, self-belief and social strategy. A student could be physically active yet still avoidant, or emotionally confident yet sedentary, and the model treats each configuration as informative rather than collapsing them into a single risk score.

For schools, the authors argue, the practical message is about differentiated assessment and support. Screening that focuses only on anxiety symptoms may miss students whose primary signal is withdrawal from social settings, or whose anxiety is intertwined with low confidence in handling anger and distress. Conversely, interventions that boost exercise participation or build emotional regulation skills, such as structured physical education programs and self-efficacy-focused counseling, may offer complementary routes to reducing social anxiety, even though the present study cannot confirm that such interventions would work. The findings also suggest that social avoidance itself, not merely the anxiety behind it, is a legitimate target for attention, given that it was the strongest correlate in the dataset.

The study’s setting matters for interpretation. All participants came from junior high schools in a single prefecture in Henan Province, and the measures were self-reported, which introduces the usual possibility of response bias. Cultural context may also shape how social anxiety, exercise and emotional expression manifest in Chinese junior high students compared with adolescents elsewhere. Still, the scale of the sample, the use of validated scales, the robust regression approach and the consistency of the results across sensitivity analyses make this a useful data point in a growing literature linking adolescent mental health to everyday behavior. As the authors conclude, social anxiety among junior high students appears to be associated with multiple behavioral and psychological domains rather than a single factor, and effective support will need to consider exercise participation, confidence in managing difficult emotions and avoidance-related behavior alongside anxiety symptoms themselves.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional associations of physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy and social avoidance with social anxiety among junior high school students

Article Title: Social anxiety, physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, and social avoidance among junior high school students: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Du, Y., Zhang, K., Wu, W., & Liu, M. (2026). Social anxiety, physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, and social avoidance among junior high school students: a cross-sectional study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05742-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05742-5

Keywords: social anxiety, adolescents, physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, social avoidance, junior high school students, cross-sectional study, BMC Psychology, mental health, China, fear of negative evaluation, school psychology