Exercise has been shown to be effective in treating depression, but trials testing the effect of exercise for depressed adolescents utilising mental health services are rare. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a preferred intensity exercise intervention on the depressive symptoms of adolescents with depression. We randomly assigned 87 adolescents who were receiving treatment for depression to either 12 sessions of aerobic exercise at preferred intensity alongside treatment as usual or treatment as usual only. The primary outcome was depressive symptom change using the Children’s Depression Inventory 2nd Version (CDI-2) at post intervention. Secondary outcomes were health-related quality of life and physical activity rates. Outcomes were taken at baseline, post intervention and at six month follow up. CDI-2 score reduction did not differ significantly between groups at post-intervention (est. 95 % CI −6.82, 1.68, p = 0.23). However, there was a difference in CDI-2 score reduction at six month follow-up in favour of the intervention of −4.81 (est. 95 % CI −9.49, −0.12, p = 0.03). Health-related quality of life and physical activity rates did not differ significantly between groups at post-intervention and follow-up. There was no additional effect of preferred intensity exercise alongside treatment as usual on depressive reduction immediately post intervention. However, effects were observed at six months post-intervention, suggesting a delayed response. However, further trials, with larger samples are required to determine the validity of this finding. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01474837 , March 16 2011

Adolescents’ daily life has dramatically changed during the COVID-19 era due to the social restrictions that have been imposed, including closures of schools, leisure centers and sport facilities. The purpose of this study was to examine levels of well-being and mood and their relations with physical (in)activity and eating behaviors in adolescents during a lockdown period in Greece. A total of 950 adolescents (Mean Age = 14.41 years ± 1.63) participated in a web-based survey while education was conducted online and organized sport activities were interrupted. Participants showed poor well-being, insufficient physical activity levels and moderate scores of healthy eating behavior. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that, after controlling for the effect of gender and body mass index, increased physical activity and healthier eating behavior predicted better well-being (b = 0.24, p < 0.01 and b = 0.19, p < 0.01, respectively), whereas sedentariness predicted worse well-being (b = −0.16, p < 0.01). Furthermore, it was revealed that days of physical activity per week was a stronger predictor of well-being than minutes of physical activity per week, and that both in-house and out-of-house physical activity were beneficial. Considering that well-being in our study was below the threshold recommended by the World Health Organization as indicative of possible depressive symptoms, measures to increase physical activity, decrease sedentariness and improve eating behavior should become a priority for communities and policy makers.

In the sport psychology literature, the use of self-talk strategies has proven effective for enhancing task performance, and preliminary evidence suggests that the effectiveness of self-talk can be partly attributed to attentional mechanisms. The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the effects of self-talk strategies on different attention functions, namely, alertness, vigilance, focused, selective, divided, and spatial attention. A between-subjects experimental design was adopted. Six experiments were conducted involving 255 (130 males and 125 females) participants (mean age 21.17 ± 2.31), assigned into experimental and control groups. A five-session protocol was implemented including baseline testing, training intervention, and final assessment. The Test Battery for Perception and Attention Functions from the Vienna Test System was used to assess attention functions. The analysis showed that in all experiments, in 14 out of 17 tests, the experimental groups had faster reaction times than the control groups, and a meta-analytic synthesis of the results showed a large effect size (d = 0.75). The findings suggest that self-talk benefit the attention functions and support postulations for an attentional interpretation of the facilitating effects of self-talk strategies on task performance.