Orienteering and adolescent depressive and anxiety symptoms: indirect associations via psychological resilience and moderation by ADHD symptoms

ObjectiveTo examine whether participation in orienteering is associated with adolescents’ depression and anxiety, and to examine whether the association between orienteering participation and depressive or anxiety symptoms was statistically linked to resilience, and whether ADHD symptoms moderated this indirect association.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted among adolescents aged 10, 19 years in Sichuan, China (N = 1,154). Participants reported orienteering participation, resilience, ADHD symptoms, depression, and anxiety. Moderated mediation was tested using PROCESS, and predictive models (ridge regression and XGBoost) with SHAP values were used as a robustness check.ResultsOrienteering participation was positively associated with resilience, and resilience was negatively associated with depression and anxiety. The direct associations between orienteering participation and depression/anxiety were not significant; however, resilience showed significant indirect associations linking orienteering participation to lower depression and anxiety. ADHD symptoms moderated the second stage of the mediation, such that the protective indirect association via resilience was stronger at higher levels of ADHD symptoms (index of moderated mediation = −0.02 for both outcomes). Machine-learning models yielded moderate predictive performance (holdout R2 ≈ 0.35 for depression and 0.29 for anxiety), with ADHD symptoms, resilience, and their interaction among the most influential predictors.ConclusionOrienteering participation was associated with fewer internalizing problems, and this association was statistically reflected in higher resilience. This indirect association was more pronounced among adolescents with elevated ADHD symptoms.