Against the backdrop of rising depression and anxiety among college students worldwide, this study aims to explore how campus sports atmosphere (SSE) enhances self compassion ability (SCA) through a dual mediating pathway of interpersonal harmony (IH) and interpersonal alienation (IA), and further analyze the role of SSE in alleviating psychological distress. Firstly, a cross-sectional survey was conducted using stratified cluster sampling on 1872 undergraduate students from North China University, covering multiple disciplines such as engineering, science, humanities, and arts. The study used validated scales to measure SSE (facility availability, curriculum richness, teacher-student interaction), IH (emotional support, tool support), IA (emotional isolation, cognitive alienation, including cultural adaptation items), and SCA (self friendliness, shared humanity, mindfulness). Secondly, the dual mediation pathway was analyzed using structural equation modeling (AMOS 28.0) combined with Bootstrap test (5000 samples), while controlling for variables such as gender, grade, and urban-rural origin. The experimental results showed that SSE significantly improved SCA (β=0.46, 95% CI [0.38, 0.54]). Among them, the mediating effect of IA reduction accounted for 23.9% of the total effect (β=0.11, 95% CI [0.08, 0.15]), while the mediating effect of IH enhancement only accounted for 6.5% (β=0.03, 95% CI [0.01, 0.05]). There is a strong negative correlation between IA and SCA (r=-0.41, p<0.001), and its explanatory variance (16.8%) even exceeds the direct impact of SSE on SCA (9.6%). It is worth noting that SSE is significantly negatively correlated with IA (r=-0.31, p<0.001), indicating that SSE has a protective effect in resisting interpersonal stressors that trigger anxiety. This discovery emphasizes the necessity of redesigning sports spaces (such as following open space principles) and courses (such as collaborative tasks) to reduce interpersonal alienation, providing empirical evidence for incorporating sports into campus mental health interventions.
