Physical Exercise Predicts Social Competence and General Well-Being in Chinese Children 10 to 15 Years Old: a Preliminary Study Jinlong Su 1 & Zhen Wu 2 & Yanjie Su 1 Accepted: 31 December 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Studies have confirmed a variety of physical and psychological benefits of physical exercise in children, but it remains unclear if there is a relation between physical exercise and children’ s social competence. Considering that social interactions are often involved when children do physical exercise, we speculated that physical exercise might predict children’ s social competence, as well as general well-being. In the current study, we aimed to examine this possibility with the statistics of a nationally representative sample of China (n = 3459, age range = 10–15 yrs). Data on children’ s self-reported physical exercise frequency, social competence and general well-being were collected. The results showed that: (a) physical exercise positively predicted the number of good friends, friendship intimacy and social skills in children; (b) the relation between physical exercise and the number of good friends was moderated by age, such that physical exercise played a less important role as age increased; (c) physical exercise was positively related to children’ s general well-being and the relation was mediated by children’ s social competence. We concluded that physical exercise might relate to improved social competence and general well-being of 10–15 years old Chinese children. Keywords Physical exercise . Social competence . General well-being . Children 1 Introduction Physical exercise, which usually implies a regular, structured, leisure-time pursuit such as running and aerobic dancing, is considered to be important in the development of Child Ind Res https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-017-9523-2 * Yanjie Su yjsu@pku.edu.cn 1 School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Beijing 100871, People’ s Republic of China 2 Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’ s Republic of China