Cost-utility analysis of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation as adjunctive therapies in Chinese patients with major depressive disorder.

Life satisfaction (LS), proposed by American psychologist Diener et al., is considered a core component of subjective well-being and reflects an individual’s cognitive judgment of overall life conditions. For college students, LS is closely related to emotional health, learning motivation, interpersonal functioning, and adjustment, and thus serves as an important indicator of their developmental status. Existing studies suggest that psychological capital (PsyCap), physical activity (PA), and various aspects of perceived stress (PS) are each associated with LS. In addition, when understanding psychological and behavioral outcomes, it is also necessary to pay attention to the links among multi-stage emotional, cognitive, and resource-related processes. This perspective suggests that overall life evaluations may be embedded in broader psychological processes, rather than only reflected in independent associations among variables. PA, PsyCap, and PS represent three important psychological dimensions: behavioral engagement, internal psychological resources, and stress experience. PA involves bodily participation and emotional regulation; PsyCap reflects internal resources that help sustain positive functioning; PS represents students’ subjective appraisal of environmental demands relative to their coping resources. Since LS is a global evaluative judgment, examining these dimensions together may help present more clearly the relationship between college students’ daily adjustment and life evaluations. In daily student contexts, PsyCap may co-occur with lower PS, and variations in PS are related to students’ evaluations of life. Existing research has rarely examined PA, PsyCap, and PS within an integrated psychological framework. Moreover, few studies have considered these variables as interconnected psychological processes that unfold within the same model. Prior work also has not clarified whether PA is related to both increases in positive psychological resources and decreases in stress experiences. Although prior evidence links PA with LS, how PA aligns with sequential shifts in PsyCap and PS in relation to LS remains insufficiently clarified. Based on this gap, the present study proposes a chain mediation model that includes PsyCap and PS to examine how PA is associated with LS through sequential variations in internal resources and stress experiences. This integrative framework aims to provide a more systematic and coherent explanation of the psychological processes related to LS among college students. The Stress-Coping Model, proposed by Lazarus, suggests that when individuals encounter stressors from the external environment, they engage in a cognitive appraisal process to evaluate both the potential threat of the event and their available resources to cope with it. This model has been widely applied in fields such as developmental psychology and health psychology. And it is frequently used to analyze individuals’ emotional responses, coping strategies, and psychological adaptation outcomes in stressful contexts. Specifically, when internal resources are at a higher level, individuals tend to show more positive appraisals and coping patterns, which are associated with more favorable evaluations of life.