The influence of Taijiquan exercise on the subjective well-being of college students: Mediator and regulatory effects

Objective: To explore the influence of Taijiquan exercise on students' subjective well-being and its internal mechanism, and to investigate the role of basic psychological needs as a mediating factor and psychological resilience as a moderating factor. Methods: In this study, 810 students from three different schools were surveyed by Taijiquan exercise scale, subjective well-being scale, basic psychological needs scale and mental resilience scale. Subsequently, SPSS27.0 software is used to analyze and process the collected data in detail. In order to further reveal the mediating role of basic psychological needs between Taijiquan exercise and subjective well-being, we further used AMOS28.0 software to build a structural equation model, and adopted the Bootstrap mediation effect test method to analyze the path relationship between variables in detail. Results: There were significant pairwise correlations among Taijiquan exercise, subjective well-being, basic psychological needs and psychological resilience. The direct effect analysis showed that Taijiquan exercise had a significant direct effect on the subjective well-being of college students (β = 0.420, P < 0.001). The mediating effect analysis showed that basic psychological need played a partial mediating role in the influence of Taijiquan on the subjective well-being of college students, and its effect size was 0.237, 95% confidence interval was [0.022,0.252]. Meanwhile, mental resilience played a moderating role in this process (β = 0.166, P < 0.001). Conclusion: Taijiquan exercise can not only directly improve students' subjective well-being, but also indirectly affect students' subjective well-being through the mediating effect of basic psychological needs and the regulating effect of psychological resilience.