ArticleFrontiers in sports and active living2026
Emotional intelligence mediates the relationship between sport type and social anxiety in adolescents.
Article in Frontiers in sports and active living, 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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Abstract
Background: Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened social anxiety vulnerability. Organized sport may protect mental health, but the psychological mechanisms linking sport type to social anxiety remain unclear. Objective: This study examined whether specific emotional intelligence dimensions mediate the association between sport type and social anxiety among adolescents, and whether sex or age moderates these relationships. Methods: The sample comprised 1,036 adolescents (603 girls and 433 boys), aged 12-17 years. Participants completed self-report measures assessing sport participation (no sport = 684; individual = 156; and team = 196), emotional intelligence, and social anxiety. Mediation and moderated-mediation analyses were conducted using bootstrapped regression models. Results: The use of emotion emerged as the most consistent mediator between sport participation and lower levels of social anxiety. Both individual and team sports were indirectly associated with lower fear of negative evaluation, reduced social avoidance and distress through a greater use of emotion. Team sport participation also showed a direct positive association with fear of negative evaluation, indicating inconsistent mediation. Sex showed no significant moderation effect. Age influenced certain direct and indirect pathways, with team sport participation showing a transient positive association with fear of negative evaluation during early adolescence, buffered by stable protective indirect effects of use of emotion across ages. Conclusions: These findings indicate that sport participation types were indirectly associated with lower social anxiety in adolescents through adaptive use of emotion, while also suggesting that team sport contexts may amplify evaluative pressures that increase fear of negative evaluation during early adolescence.
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