A Study on a Mental Health Education Model for University Students Based on Expressive Arts Therapy

Abstract

First-year university students often face considerable pressure related to psychological adjustment, and traditional lecture-based mental health courses have limited effects on improving emotion regulation. This study examined the use of expressive arts therapy as a classroom intervention and observed changes in students’ psychological experiences and emotion-processing habits. A quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control-group design was adopted. Two intact first-year classes taking a compulsory public mental health course at one university were selected by convenience sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental and control conditions by drawing lots; individual students were not randomly assigned. The experimental group (n = 43) received eight weeks of expressive arts therapy intervention, while the control group (n = 42) continued with routine classroom teaching. Data were collected before and after the intervention using the SCL-90 and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Before the intervention, no statistically significant differences were found between the two groups. After the intervention, the experimental group showed significant decreases in SCL-90 scores for anxiety, depression, interpersonal sensitivity, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms, an increase in ERQ cognitive reappraisal scores, and a decrease in expressive suppression scores (P < 0.05), and post-intervention between-group effect sizes were moderate to large (Hedges’ g = 0.70–1.26). The control group showed no significant changes. Within this single-site sample of two intact classes, the findings suggest that expressive arts therapy may help alleviate negative psychological experiences and support more adaptive emotion regulation. Because of the small sample and the absence of individual random assignment, the findings are context-specific and should not be generalized to university students broadly.