Development of leisure scores according to mental, physical, and social components and investigation of their impacts on mental health

ABSTRACTPerforming single leisure activity simultaneously requires mental, physical, and social effort. This research aimed to represent the extent of the three components using numerical scores and examined whether the scores are related to mental health. To determine the component scores, 1200 Japanese participants of varied ages chose activities they had ever experienced from 97 choices. They rated each of them regarding their mental, physical, and social efforts to perform it (0-none to 4-high). They also reported their level of psychological resilience and depressive symptoms. Based on the rating frequency, the three component scores for 86 activities were determined (few activities were removed during analysis). Then, a cluster analysis of the component scores classified those activities into 8 groups. Finally, the relationship between the component scores and mental health was examined. Each participant’s mental, physical, and social personal scores were calculated by adding the component score (e.g. mental score) of all the activities he/she rated. The individuals with high scores for all three components showed better mental health than those having fewer high-score components. The established scores should be helpful for future research, and it is revealed that exerting effort for all three components through leisure benefits mental health.KEYWORDS: Classificationcombination effectsleisure component scoremental healthrating evaluation AcknowledgementsTwo JSPS KAKENHI grants, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) 19H01761 and Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (A) 20H05803, and the 2020 Collaborative Research Support Program of Kanazawa University supported this work.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary MaterialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2023.2256027Notes1. Additional scrutiny of these participants revealed that those who rated no activity were predominantly in one of the following categories: older females, currently employed, and having offspring. Compared to the participants who rated some activities, they reported lower resilience and higher depression scores. The lower mental health scores can be the result of lacking leisure participation or the cause of it.Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [19H01761; 20H05803].Notes on contributorsYuta TakiguchiYuta Takiguch is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute of the Liberal Arts and Science at Kanazawa University, Japan. In his research, he focuses on the long-term effect of lifetime activities, as well as the development of generalized trust and distrust.Mie MatsuiMie Matsui is a Professor of clinical neuropsychology in the Institute of Liberal Arts and Science at Kanazawa University. Her research has been in the study of brain and behavior in patients with schizophrenia and neurological disease. She has mainly focused on cognitive function and cognitive reserve in those patients and is also interested in cognitive remediation for them.Mariko KikutaniMariko Kikutani is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Liberal Arts and Science at Kanazawa University, Japan. Her research focuses on face perception, emotion recognition, psychology of language, and cross-cultural psychology. She is particularly interested in comparing emotion concepts across cultures.Kota EbinaKota Ebina is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, Kanazawa University. His research interests are cognitive impairment in patients with schizophrenia and brain tumors.