For a subset of women -- those with eating disorders -- exercise may have no feel-good effects. In fact, it may induce just the opposite feeling. And women in general may get less psychological benefit from exercising than men.
Those are among the conclusions presented last month by researchers Jennifer Gerlach and Dorothy Espelage at the American Psychological Association annual convention in Chicago. Gerlach, the principal researcher on the study, is a doctoral student in educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Espelage, the study's co-author, is a professor of educational psychology in the university's College of Education.
The study involved 324 undergraduates at Illinois, 235 women and 86 men, with an average age of 19.9 years, who were asked to complete questionnaires assessing exercise behavior, strategies for coping with stress, self-esteem, life satisfaction, positive and negative affect (similar to mood), depression, anxiety and eating behavior. The men and women were comparable in their level of exercise.
The researchers' primary goal was to determine how exercise was used as a strategy for coping with stress. But what they found in the process were curious associations between exercise and psychological health.
For the men as a group, they found statistically significant associations between exercise and almost every measure of psychological health. For the women, however, most of those associations were either weak or statistically insignificant. The researchers also found that exercise was related to both positive and negative affect, "and that didn't make sense," Gerlach said.
They hypothesized that eating disorders played a part in the contrary numbers, and so split the women into subgroups.
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Contact: Craig Chamberlain
cdchambe@uiuc.edu
217-333-2894
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
30-Aug-2002