Background: Q&A corpora generated through university student–AI mental health support tools may reveal how physical activity (PA) and psychosocial themes are represented in support-oriented text. However, the absence of individual-level demographic metadata and the pooling of prompt and response fields limit attribution of any expression to a particular speaker, and the corpus describes a specific student population rather than a general or clinical one. Objective: This exploratory study described PA-, sport-, physical education (PE)-, body-, lifestyle-, and emotion-related patterns in a large corpus of university student–AI mental health exchanges collected through an institutional counselling platform. Methods: This study analysed 209,715 paired prompt–response records as combined exchange-level units using a BERTopic-based computational text-mining workflow. The full corpus was used for the main 18-topic model and overlapping dictionary analyses. After secondary data-quality filtering, 178,062 eligible exchanges formed the sampling frame from which a systematic sample of 10,000 exchanges was drawn for a separate complementary BERTopic and scenario-mapping analysis. The workflow used Qdrant/bge-small-zh-v1.5 embeddings, NFKC normalisation, an archived stop-word list, UMAP (n_neighbors = 15, n_components = 5, min_dist = 0.0, cosine metric, seed = 42), HDBSCAN (min_cluster_size = 300, min_samples = 10, Euclidean metric, EOM), c-TF-IDF topic representations, overlapping dictionary screens, and stability testing across seeds 42, 52, and 62. Results: A student/school/family-context lexical screen matched 83,215 exchanges (39.68%), and a broad PA/body/lifestyle screen matched 82,464 exchanges (39.32%). These overlapping indicators describe topical co-occurrence and do not establish PA behaviour or which party to the exchange produced a given term. Eighteen corpus-level themes were retained. In the 10,000-exchange analysis, 13.11% of exchanges matched a narrow movement-related expression screen, with the highest within-topic rate in the sample topic labelled emotional outburst and relaxation regulation (51.09%). Conclusions: The findings describe exchange-level lexical and topic patterns in student–AI interactions rather than actual PA behaviour, intervention delivery, clinical efficacy, or population prevalence, and they do not identify which party introduced the language. The mapping to autonomy, competence, relatedness, and emotional regulation is a post hoc interpretive lens, offered as a hypothesis to inform future, prospectively validated design work in PE and digital mental health support rather than as a demonstrated result.

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly used in educational and mental health contexts, yet many emotion-related applications still prioritize detection, classification, and automated feedback over contextual understanding. This study uses the Stanford AI Index Reports (2021–2025) as an exploratory discourse corpus to examine how prominent AI reports frame technology, application domains, and governance, and to consider what this framing implies for emotion regulation through sport and exercise in higher education. Methods: Across 1813 report pages, we applied BERTopic with multilingual sentence embeddings (paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2), UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN clustering, and class-based TF-IDF, followed by dynamic and hierarchical topic analysis and theory-informed synthesis. Of 22 topics generated, 13 relevant to the study focus were retained and validated through keyword inspection, representative-text review, and independent expert agreement. Results: The analysis indicated a three-layer structure: a technology core, an application-expansion layer, and an ethics-and-governance layer. Health and education themes grew most across reports, with medicine/health rising from 14 to 105 and school pathways from 3 to 105 segment occurrences between 2021 and 2025, whereas sport, exercise, embodied activity, and campus support appeared only indirectly. As prominence reflects raw frequency across five reports, trends are read descriptively. Conclusions: We propose a human–technology–environment framework comprising multimodal contextual profiling, autonomy-supportive task adaptation, feedback–reflection–practice loops, peer and campus support integration, and human-in-the-loop governance. The study does not test intervention effects; its contribution is conceptual and agenda-setting, clarifying a gap between mainstream AI discourse and the embodied, relational, and ecological conditions through which sport and exercise may support students’ emotion regulation.