The cost of celebrity worship: a longitudinal study of sports celebrity worship, appearance perfectionism, and generalized anxiety disorder in college students.

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Article in BMC psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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0citing papers in PubMed

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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

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0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Weinan ZhouCollege of Physical Education, Guangdong University of Education, 351 Xingang Central Road, Haizhu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. waylandchou123@gmail.com.ORCID http://orcid.org/0009-0007-3886-396X

Jialei GuCollege of Physical Education, Shanghai Normal University, 100 Guilin Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China.ORCID http://orcid.org/0009-0000-9232-1335

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal relationships among sports celebrity worship, appearance perfectionism and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) among college students. The levels of sports celebrity worship, appearance perfectionism and GAD were assessed in 593 college students at two time points (T1 and T2), six months apart, using a self-report survey. Cross-lagged modeling was applied to examine the potential causal relationships among the three variables, with SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0 used for statistical analysis. The results indicated that sports celebrity worship had a stable, positive association across time on both appearance perfectionism and GAD, whereas appearance perfectionism had a stable, positive association across time on GAD. These results suggest the negative psychological effects of sports celebrity worship and physical appearance perfectionism on college students, clarify the influence mechanisms of college students' GAD, and provide evidence-based recommendations.

Indexed as

Generalized Anxiety DisorderPerfectionismSportsStudentsAdolescentAdultFemaleHumansLongitudinal StudiesMaleUniversitiesYoung AdultAppearance perfectionismCollege studentsCross-lagged analysisGeneralized anxiety disorderSports celebrity worship

Identifiers

PMID42116210

DOI10.1186/s40359-026-04739-4

PMCPMC13335256

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Textmetadata

LicenceCC BY-NC-ND

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.