Exploring the relationship between physical activity, flood experience, eco-anxiety, and youth well-being in a...

Climate change threatens human health, but its psychological effects on young people remains relatively understudied. Conversely, ample evidence demonstrates that Physical Activity (PA) positively impacts the psychological well-being in young people. Thus, this cross-sectional study investigated whether PA moderates the impact of a large flood experience on the relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being in young people. One thousand twenty-one (N = 1.021) adolescents aged 9 to 16 years old (Mage = 12.35 ± 1.38) completed measures for PA frequency, flood experience, eco-anxiety, and psychological well-being, six month after Daniel extreme flood event in Greece. Moderated moderation analysis was conducted to test the hypothesized model using PROCESS macro. We examined whether the relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being was moderated by flood experience alone, PA frequency alone, and/or flood experience and PA frequency combined. However the three-way interaction predicted only a very small of unique variance in well-being, ΔR² = 0.007. Further examination of the three-way interaction showed that when PA frequency scores were lower than 2.71 days/week, flood experience potentiated the negative effect of eco-anxiety on well-being. In contrast, the moderating influence of flood experience on the relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being was buffered when PA frequency scores were higher than 6.25 days/week. Findings provide initial support that frequent PA participation (6-7 days /week) may improve the well-being of children and adolescents in times of crisis, potentially by reducing the effect of flood-related experience on the negative relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being.