Abstract
Because of the prevalence of mental health disorders in today’s society, it is important that adolescents are aware of various interventions to reduce their risk of developing these disorders and improve their overall wellbeing. The current study examined how participating in team relative to individual sports has beneficial effects on an adolescent’s prosocial functioning and mental health outcomes. This study was a secondary data analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which is a longitudinal study on child health and development in the United States. Data from the first three years of the ABCD study were used, and the sample size with complete data was N = 3,187. Males were slightly overrepresented (54.1%, N = 1,724), and participant ages ranged from 10 to 14 years (M = 11.51, SD = 0.68). We hypothesized that team sport participation would predict better social functioning and internalizing difficulties, but that these effects would be mediated by higher DHEA levels, greater number of close friendships at time 1 and better overall fitness. The individuals who participated in team sports or both team and individual sports exhibited higher levels of prosocial functioning and lower levels of anxiety, depression, social problems, and internalizing problems across the three time points, but did not predict improved levels of internalizing problems or prosocial functioning. The only exception to this pattern was that participants involved in team sports showed decreased levels of withdrawn depression. The only evidence of mediation was with withdrawn depression. The number of close friends partially mediated the effect of sports participation in the previous year on withdrawn depression. Higher levels of DHEA were associated with lower levels of anxious depression in the third year. These findings suggest that sports participation, particularly team sports, could potentially serve to prevent internalizing problems in adolescents.