Effects of Online Video Sport Spectatorship on the Subjective Well-Being of College Students: The Moderating Effect of Sport Involvement.

Individuals' engagement in sports and sport-related entertainment is reported to improve their subjective well-being (SWB). We investigated whether online video sport spectatorship (OVSS) enhances the SWB of college students and whether sport involvement moderates the correlation between OVSS and SWB. For this, a pretest-posttest experimental design with a 3-week-long intervention (OVSS) was adopted. Two groups, intervention and control, were formed. The findings revealed that OVSS improved SWB (p = 0.017). Furthermore, sport involvement moderated the correlation between OVSS and SWB (p = 0.024). Specifically, participants with high levels of sport involvement in the intervention group exhibited better SWB (M = 5.51) than did the corresponding controls (M = 4.69). By contrast, among participants with low levels of sport involvement, only the intervention group showed improved SWB; however, it remained unchanged in the control group. The present study enriches the relevant literature and provides empirical evidence for the psychological benefits conferred by OVSS. Our findings may serve as a reference for designing interventions aimed at improving individuals' overall quality of life.

The relationship between physical activity trajectories and frailty: a 20-year prospective cohort among community-dwelling older people.

BACKGROUND: Studies on examining the relationship between physical activity patterns and frailty are lacking. This study examined physical activity patterns in older people and investigated the relationship between physical activity and frailty as well as identifying the predictors of frailty. METHODS: We used a nationally representative longitudinal database, the Taiwan Longitudinal Study of Aging (TLSA) database, and data for a 20-year period were extracted and analyzed. A total of 5131 participants aged ≥ 60 years in 1996 were included in the current analysis. Information regarding demographic characteristics, frailty, physical activity, comorbidities, oral health, and depressive symptoms was extracted from the TLSA database. Physical activity patterns were examined using group-based trajectory modeling from 1996 to 2015. Potential predictors were examined by performing multivariate logistic regression. RESULTS: Four trajectories of the physical activity pattern were found: consistently physically inactive (33.7%), consistently physically active (21.5%), incline (21.6%), and decline (23.2%). Throughout the period, the trajectories of the four groups significantly differed from each other at year 2015, with the incline and decline groups exhibiting the lowest and highest frailty scores, respectively (p < 0.001). Older age, male, poor oral health, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and depressive symptoms were identified as risk factors for frailty. CONCLUSION: Physical activity reduces the risk of chronic conditions, which contributes to healthy longevity. This study can guide the development of future research and interventions to manage frailty in older people, particularly in considering previous physical activity trajectories within the life course.

Robustness of autoencoders for establishing psychometric properties based on small sample sizes: results from a Monte Carlo simulation study and a sports fan curiosity study.

Background: The principal component analysis (PCA) is known as a multivariate statistical model for reducing dimensions into a representation of principal components. Thus, the PCA is commonly adopted for establishing psychometric properties, i.e., the construct validity. Autoencoder is a neural network model, which has also been shown to perform well in dimensionality reduction. Although there are several ways the PCA and autoencoders could be compared for their differences, most of the recent literature focused on differences in image reconstruction, which are often sufficient for training data. In the current study, we looked at details of each autoencoder classifier and how they may provide neural network superiority that can better generalize non-normally distributed small datasets. Methodology: A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted, varying the levels of non-normality, sample sizes, and levels of communality. The performances of autoencoders and a PCA were compared using the mean square error, mean absolute value, and Euclidian distance. The feasibility of autoencoders with small sample sizes was examined. Conclusions: With extreme flexibility in decoding representation using linear and non-linear mapping, this study demonstrated that the autoencoder can robustly reduce dimensions, and hence was effective in building the construct validity with a sample size as small as 100. The autoencoders could obtain a smaller mean square error and small Euclidian distance between original dataset and predictions for a small non-normal dataset. Hence, when behavioral scientists attempt to explore the construct validity of a newly designed questionnaire, an autoencoder could also be considered an alternative to a PCA.

An Exploratory Study of the Association between Housing Price Trends and Antidepressant Use in Taiwan: A 10-Year Population-Based Study.

This study examined the relationship between various economic indexes and incidences of antidepressant prescriptions during 2001-2011 using the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). As of 2007, approximately 98.4% of Taiwanese people were enrolled in the NHIRD. In total, 531,281 records identified as antidepressant prescriptions were collected. Furthermore, 2556 quarterly observations from the Taiwan Housing Index (THI) and Executive Yuan were retrieved. We examined the association between the housing index and antidepressant prescription incidence. During the 10-year follow-up period, a higher incidence of antidepressant prescriptions was associated with the local maximum housing index. The relative risk of being prescribed antidepressant increased by 13.3% (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.01~1.27) when the THI reached a peak. For the low-income subgroup, the relative risk of being prescribed antidepressants increased by 28% during the high season of the THI. We also stratified the study sample on the basis of their sex, age, and urbanization levels. Both sexes followed similar patterns. During 2001-2011, although rising economic indexes may have increased incomes and stimulated the housing market, the compromise of public mental health could be a cost people have to pay additional attention to.