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The authors have addressed reviewer comments.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jafri Abdullah, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
The authors have addressed my comments and I can now accept this manuscript
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As usual, I have invited comments from experts from your research domain.
As you will see, multiple limitations were highlighted by reviewers that would need to be addressed/explained carefully.
Taken altogether, let me invite you to prepare a revision that addresses the issues, together with a cover letter explaining how you did so. My plan is to resend the revision to the present referees.
[# PeerJ Staff Note: Please ensure that all review and editorial comments are addressed in a response letter and any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate. #]
In te manuscript, Pereira-Payo et al., have shown that higher physical activity (reflected from physical activity index, physical activity levels) and perceived social support are markers for psychological distress (stress/mental health/coping) for people with anxiety. The manuscript is well structured, but I have a few points that need to be addressed before the manuscript is published
1) For the general reader, it is difficult to understand the questionnaire which is references but not explained well in the text. Please explain the questionnaire and what how are parameters distributed in the methods section.
2) Distribution of scores across males and females is well represented, however, it is not mentioned if Bonferroni correction was done on the reported p values and they are adjusted p values or not. Please show raw and adjusted p values.
3) Comprehending tables is hard for general audience with so much data, I would suggest the authors to show boxplots (median with IQR) to represent data across different PAL groups and their corresponding scoring for all, males and females group in the same plot. This would visually show baseline differences across males and females, and also changes across PAL groups.
4) The authors mentioned a weal inverse correlation between PAL and GHQ target variables (rho is negative) however, the table reports all positive values. Positive rho means there is a +ve correlation which is against the thesis of the paper. Please check.
The experimental design is good and well reported. Please try to provide raw data after deidentifying subjects.
Discussed in previous sections.
In this manuscript, the authors explore the correlation between physical activity level and perceived sense of social support on adult patients with anxiety in Spain.
The English is clear except for some minor changes as I suggest in the pdf attached. I also recommend getting the text proof-read by a fluent English speaker to weed out grammar issues.
The design of the correlations analysis are set up well, with reasonable numbers for statistical powers. However, the claims made by authors are drawn from rather low values of correlation, around r=-0.0.158 (lines 277-278) and more places. Even though these correlations are significant, they are rather low, and with the large N that the authors have, even small correlations are likely to be significant.
I highly advise against drawing conclusions with small correlation values
In my opinion, the findings are not as stark as the authors call out, as I point out in the Experimental Findings section. That is fine, as long as the authors edit the language so that the text is consistent with the numbers they report.
More importantly, however, correlation does not imply causation. The authors do point this out, but this is done at the very end, in the discussion about "Limitations", whereas before that, the authors use causation in their language to express the correlation, for example in the title of the paper and the abstract. This should be modified and addressed
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