Effects of physical activity on regulatory emotional self-efficacy, resilience, and emotional intelligence of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic

The normalization of epidemic prevention and control has exacerbated nurses’ physical and mental stresses. The important role of physical activity in relieving nurses’ physical and mental stresses has received extensive attention from researchers in recent years. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of physical activity on the regulatory emotional self-efficacy, resilience, and emotional intelligence of nurses and explain their interactions. The present study adopted the cluster sampling method. From April to May 2022, a total of 500 nurses in six municipal hospitals in Changsha City were selected. Finally, 402 valid data samples were obtained. Afterward, AMOS 23.0 (by maximum likelihood estimation) was used to process the collected data and analyze the proposed hypotheses by using 5,000 bootstrap samples to test the mediating effects of the structural equation model. The results demonstrated that there are positive correlations between physical activity and resilience (standardized coefficients = 0.232, p < 0.001), resilience and regulatory emotional self-efficacy (standardized coefficients = 0.449, p < 0.001), and emotional intelligence and regulatory emotional self-efficacy (standardized coefficients = 0.330, p < 0.001). The positive influence of physical activity on emotional regulation self-efficacy is completely mediated by emotional intelligence and resilience (standardized indirect effect = 0.237, p < 0.01), and this explanatory power is far higher than any previous study (R(2) = 0.49). The positive emotions generated by an individual’s physical activity have an important explanatory role for individuals who want to establish more emotional regulation self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and psychological resilience.