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A. Khalid

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Open access Jul 2026

Eating patterns and psychological distress among young women: the moderating role of cognitive reappraisal.

BACKGROUND Psychological distress among university students is a pressing public health concern. Emerging research in nutritional psychology links eating patterns to mental health outcomes, while emotion regulation processes shape individual stress responses. Female university students in Pakistan are particularly vulnerable due to compounding sociocultural pressures, rigorous academic demands, and limited mental health resources. This cross-sectional study investigates the association between eating patterns and psychological distress in this demographic, specifically examining whether cognitive reappraisal (an adaptive emotion regulation strategy) moderates this relationship. METHODS Data were collected via purposive sampling from 354 female university students in Lahore, Pakistan. Assessments utilized the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) for dietary patterns, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) for cognitive reappraisal, and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21) for psychological distress. Data were analyzed using Pearson correlations, linear regression, and hierarchical moderation. RESULTS Healthier eating patterns were significantly associated with reduced levels of depression (r = - .233, p < .001), anxiety (r = - .174, p < .05), and stress (r = - .192, p < .05). Cognitive reappraisal correlated positively with healthier eating (r = .215, p < .05) and negatively correlated with depression (r = - .412, p < .01), anxiety (r = - .367, p < .01), and stress (r = - .389, p < .01). Regression models confirmed that eating patterns significantly predicted depression (β = - 0.23, p < .01), anxiety (β = - 0.17, p < .05), and stress (β = - 0.19, p < .01). Moderation analyses indicated that cognitive reappraisal significantly moderated the relationship between eating patterns and psychological distress (interaction β range = - 0.12 to - 0.17), explaining an additional 2-3% of variance. Specifically, higher cognitive reappraisal strengthened the protective association between healthier eating patterns and lower psychological distress while attenuating distress associated with unhealthy eating patterns. CONCLUSION Healthier eating patterns and higher levels of cognitive reappraisal were associated with lower psychological distress among young women in academic settings. Cognitive reappraisal appeared to play a protective moderating role by strengthening the beneficial association between healthier eating patterns and lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress while reducing psychological vulnerability associated with poorer eating habits. These findings highlight the importance of holistic university mental health initiatives that integrate nutritional awareness with adaptive emotion-regulation training to promote psychological well-being among female students.

A. Qamar, Ayesha Sarfaraz, A. Khalid et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

PIP-NTT: Towards a Scalable Memory-Parallelized Accelerator for Iterative NTT in PQC

The iterative forward and inverse number theoretic transform (NTT) is a key component in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography (PQC), typically implemented using Cooley-Tukey and Gentleman-Sande butterfly units. Existing iterative NTT accelerators often rely on ping-pong memory schemes and large memory blocks tied to the cyclotomic ring, which limits overall efficiency. To overcome this, we propose a memory-parallelization strategy using four smaller n/4-sized memories for ring size n, preserving the total memory footprint of conventional designs. We also introduce a multiplication-free rescaling architecture for the inverse NTT. Building on these innovations, we perform a comprehensive hardware-based design space exploration of unified Cooley-Tukey and Gentleman-Sande butterfly units, evaluating both coarse- and fine-grained pipelining strategies. The resulting optimized butterfly unit forms the core of our proposed pipelined and memory-parallelized NTT accelerator,"PIP-NTT". It integrates two such units alongside the memory-parallelization scheme to boost computational throughput under tight area constraints. Experimental results on FPGA platforms show that PIP-NTT achieves 2.67x and 1.48x higher efficiency in average Area-Time Product compared to the most area-optimized and high-speed NTT accelerators in the literature. The design is scalable across butterfly radices and adaptable to other PQC schemes, making it a versatile solution for future cryptographic hardware

Malik Imran, A. Khalid, C. Rafferty et al. · 0 citations