From Aesthetic Experience to Psychological Adjustment: A Theoretical Exploration of Aesthetic Education in Preventing Depressive States among University Students

Preventing depressive states among university students requires more than screening, referral, and professional intervention. It also requires sustained psychological support for all students, integrated into their everyday study and life. Although aesthetic education has been incorporated into the promotion of student mental health, how it contributes to the prevention of depressive states still lacks an integrated explanation. Using conceptual analysis and theoretical integration, this paper identifies risk factors across five aspects—emotion, cognition, meaning, relationships, and psychological resilience—and proposes an aesthetic experience–psychological adjustment framework. It focuses on how aesthetic experience may develop into students’ everyday capacities for regulating emotions and coping with stress. This paper argues that non-instrumental engagement, emotional expression, and appropriate psychological distance help students accept negative emotions and revise unhelpful interpretations. Sustained aesthetic experience can enrich the sources of meaning and value in life, while shared appreciation and creation can strengthen emotional connection and mutual support between people. These processes are interrelated, and their long-term development through repeated experience may lay a solid foundation for students’ psychological resilience. These effects are nevertheless shaped by autonomy in participation, the quality of aesthetic experience, the degree of emotional involvement, and individual differences. The analysis offers an approach to coordinating aesthetic education with mental health work in universities and a theoretical reference for further research.