story by Claire Miller
Physical activity is a key piece of a person’s overall health and quality of life.
But physical activity rates among college students (particularly female students) have declined in recent years, and little research has been done to better understand this trend.
Associate Professor Kathryn Wilson conducted a study published in Psychology and Health to determine how personality traits may affect female college students’ beliefs about physical activity, and how changes in beliefs could lead to changes in their physical activity.
For this study, 346 college women at Georgia State University completed a baseline survey to collect demographic information. Then, they took three subsequent surveys over a 12-week period to collect data in the following areas:
- Physical activity environment: Assessing participants’ neighborhoods to determine whether characteristics of where they lived influenced their physical activity. This includes accessibility to public areas, residential density, infrastructure to promote safety (sidewalks, streetlights, etc.), crime rates and more.
- Personality: Asking participants to rate how much they agree/disagree with a series of statements related to what psychologists refer to as the Big Five Personality Traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
- Physical activity-related social cognitions: Assessing participants’ attitudes about physical activity and how much control they believe they have over their physical activity.
- Physical activity level: Asking participants to record their physical activity each week, noting the total number of minutes of recreational, moderate-intensity and vigorous-intensity physical activity they completed.
The study’s results showed small increases in the participants’ confidence to exercise and their beliefs about physical activity, but the Big Five Personality Traits didn’t have a significant effect on physical activity beliefs or behavior over the 12-week period.
Wilson also found that changes in individuals’ physical activity beliefs didn’t lead to larger changes in how much they exercised during the study.
Even though personality traits didn’t create major changes for participants, this study could serve as a stepping stone for future research examining the connections among personality traits, physical activity beliefs and behavioral change.
This is one of a series of studies in which Wilson is exploring the possible pathways by which personality could moderate the effectiveness of physical activity interventions. She aims to determine what approaches might work best for whom and why, to maximize the impact of public health efforts towards increasing physical activity.
“To our knowledge, this is the first assessment of the moderating effect of personality on change in physical activity-related social cognitions and the relationship between change in physical activity-related social cognitions and change in physical activity behavior,” Wilson wrote. “Future work should aim to address these hypotheses over longer durations, using objective measures of physical activity and experimental manipulation to address the relationships between change in antecedents and subsequent behavior change in diverse samples.”
About the Researcher
Kathryn Wilson
Department of Kinesiology and Health
Kathryn Wilson is an associate professor with tenure in the College of Education & Human Development’s Department of Kinesiology and Health. She received her Ph.D. in exercise psychology from the University of Georgia and completed her postdoctoral training in implementation science at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She is interested in improving population health through physical activity promotion. Wilson’s research focuses on the relevance of personality differences for promoting physical activity and exercise behavior and understanding resultant psychological effects. She also contributes to interdisciplinary research with expertise in personality theory, quantitative analysis and psychometrics.
Citation
Wilson, K. E. (2025). “Does Personality Moderate Relationships Between Change in Social Cognitions and Physical Activity Among College Women?” Psychology and Health, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2025.2543602.