Psychological impact of public sports: The moderating effect of place attachment and cognitive styles

This study aimed to investigate the psychological impact of public sports with the moderating effect of place attachment and cognitive styles. For this purpose, 223 athletes in public sports centers of Tabriz were selected by the available sampling method and completed the Goldberg General Health Questionnaire, place Attachment of Kyle et al, And the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) of Vitkin et al. Since Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (p> 0.05) did not confirm the hypothesis of normality of the data, the data were analyzed by Spearman correlation, Kruskal-Wallis and regression with the alpha of 0.05. The results of the correlation test showed that there is a high correlation between place attachment and mental health considering the subscales. Univariate regression analysis also showed that place attachment predicts 0.95 units of mental health variable, which means predicting 95% of changes in this variable. This means that by increasing a standard deviation in the place attachment score, the mental health score will be reduced 0.97 Standard deviations. On the other hand, there was no significant correlation between cognitive style and mental health of the subjects considering the subscales. The results of the Kruskal-Wallis test also showed no significant difference between three different groups of cognitive style in the scores of mental health variable by considering subscales at the 0.05 test level. Therefore, according to the results, it can conclude that place attachment as a modulating variable affects people's mental health scores.