The Relationships between Physical Ex-ercise and Social and Emotional Skills in Adolescents: A Machine Learning-Based Multidimensional Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Based on the data of 7,073 Chinese adolescents who participated in the OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills 2019, the study seeks to analyze the relationships between physical exercise and individual domains of social and emotional skills in teenagers, as well as the factors influencing the relationships, using the Gradient Boosting Machine algorithm and the SHAP framework. Significant findings include that physical exercise could substantially enhance the adolescents’ social and emotional skills across all domains, with comparatively stronger effects on emotion regulation and engaging with others; that strengthening physical exercise is of particularly vital significant for socioeconomically disadvantaged adolescents; and that the positive effects of physical exercise on social and emotional skills increased with age in the teenagers; and that gender was an insignificant factor in the relationships between physical exercise and social and emotional skills.