Mental Health and Physical Activity

Mental Health and Physical Activity is an international forum for scholarly reports on any aspect of relevance to advancing our understanding of the relationship between mental health and physical activity. Please note that papers which focus exclusively on mental health, or exclusively on physical activity, will not be considered. Manuscripts will be considered for publication which deal with high quality research, comprehensive research reviews, and critical reflection of applied or research issues. The journal is open to the use of diverse methodological approaches. Reports of practice will need to demonstrate academic rigour, preferably through analysis of programme effectiveness, and go beyond mere description.

The aims of Mental Health and Physical Activity are:

(1) To foster the inter-disciplinary development and understanding of the mental health and physical activity field;
(2) To develop research designs and methods to advance our understanding;
(3) To promote the publication of high quality research on the effects of physical activity (interventions and a single session) on a wide range of dimensions of mental health and psychological well-being (e.g., depression, anxiety and stress responses, mood, cognitive functioning and neurological disorders, such as dementia, self-esteem and related constructs, psychological aspects of quality of life among people with physical and mental illness, sleep, addictive disorders, eating disorders), from both efficacy and effectiveness trials;
(4) To promote high quality research on the biophysical and psychosocial mechanisms involved to help our understanding of the link between physical activity and mental health, and guide intervention development;
(5) To provide an evidence-based source for professionals working in the field of mental health and a forum to consider service delivery issues.

Benefits to authors
We also provide many author benefits, such as free PDFs, a liberal copyright policy, special discounts on Elsevier publications and much more. Please click here for more information on our author services.

Please see our Guide for Authors for information on article submission. If you require any further information or help, please visit our Support Center

Notice to Authors Wishing to Submit to MENPA
Mental Health and Physical Activity (MENPA) is becoming increasingly competitive. We continue to receive many more manuscripts than we can possibly publish. Therefore, in order to reduce any delay in publishing the best science, the following guidelines should be considered prior to submitting a manuscript, in addition to guidance from EQUATOR (https://www.equator-network.org/).

The types of studies given the highest priority are the following:

• Etiologic or experimental studies testing a specific hypothesis or highlighting a specific mechanism relating physical activity or inactivity to mental health.

• Prospective or longitudinal studies.

• Randomised controlled trials, or related protocol papers which follow CONSORT guidelines. All submitted manuscripts reporting data from randomized controlled trials must include data on adherence to the trial intervention(s). Manuscripts that do not report adherence data will not be considered. We highly recommend that both intention-to-treat and per protocol analyses are included.

• Studies that are truly innovative and involve in-depth or novel data collection and analysis (including both quantitative and qualitative methods), or advance research methods.

• High quality, novel systematic reviews (based on quantitative and qualitative studies) that follow PRISMA guidelines.

The following types of manuscripts will be given the lowest priority and are the most likely to be rejected without review:

• Small, cross-sectional, descriptive studies without any innovative features.

• Studies having no control or reference group, unless they are clearly part of a step in testing, using mixed methods, the feasibility and acceptability of an intervention within a larger program of study.

• Studies that involve statistical hypothesis testing of intervention effects when there is no justification for the sample size.

• Studies consisting of non-clinical samples, unless they clearly add to our understanding of the physical activity and well-being relationship.

• Studies in which physical activity is only a covariate of interest.

• Studies with no recognized measure of physical activity.