Healthcare-Resource Appraisal, Health-Check Regularity, and Depressed Mood During a Public Health Emergency: The Moderating Role of Leisure Internet Use

Public health emergencies can heighten uncertainty about access to essential healthcare resources, with implications for emotional well-being. Using the 2021 Chinese General Social Survey, this study examined the associations of healthcare-access concern and health-check regularity with depressed mood frequency and assessed whether leisure internet use moderated the concern–mood association. The eligible subsample comprised 2717 respondents randomly assigned to the East Asian Social Survey health module; after excluding 25 respondents with missing or non-substantive responses, the final analytical sample was 2692. Ordinary least squares models with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors adjusted for sex, age, self-rated health, marital status, chronic disease, and educational attainment. Greater healthcare-access concern was associated with more frequent depressed mood, whereas greater health-check regularity was associated with less frequent depressed mood. The concern-by-internet-use interaction was negative but very small. Simple slopes remained positive at all examined levels of internet use. Sensitivity analyses included ordinal models, bootstrap estimation, and categorical specifications of leisure internet use. The two principal associations remained stable, whereas the moderation finding was sensitive to model specification. The results describe cross-sectional, sample-based associations and do not establish causal or clinically meaningful effects.