Abstract Background With societal development, contemporary college students face multiple pressures stemming from academics, employment, and interpersonal relationships, leading to increasingly severe anxiety issues. Traditional psychological intervention methods often focus on addressing surface-level problems while neglecting the underlying causes of students' psychological distress. To alleviate anxiety and enhance positive emotions and psychological resilience among college students, this study combines historical-themed sculpture with art therapy to create a novel intervention model targeting anxiety issues in this demographic. Methods The study adopted a mixed research design, combined with quantitative evaluation and qualitative analysis, and randomly recruited 126 college students with moderate anxiety symptoms from a certain university to participate. They were randomly divided into an experimental group (63 people) and a control group (63 people). The control group did not receive any intervention, while the experimental group received an 8-week historical themed sculpture art therapy intervention, which included appreciation of works, tactile awakening, emotional visualization creation, and group sharing. The study used the Self Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), Positive Emotion Scale (PES), and Connor Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) to measure and collect data at three time points: pre-test, post test, and delayed post test (one month after the end of the intervention). SPSS 22.0 was used for repeated measures analysis of variance, and the p-value was used to represent the statistical significance level. The F-value of the interaction effect between time and group was used to test whether the intervention effect changed over time and whether there was significant difference between groups. Results Specific data for the experimental and control groups are detailed in Table 1. In Table 1, there were significant interaction effects between the experimental group and the control group in all three indicators, with F-values of 12.35, 10.87, and 9.73 for SAS, PES, and CD-RISC, respectively (p.001). Among them, the SAS score of the experimental group decreased from 63.24 ± 5.37 before intervention to 48.16 ± 6.25 after intervention, and decreased to 45.33 ± 5.84 in the delayed post test; The PES score increased from 22.15 ± 3.28 before intervention to 28.76 ± 3.45 after intervention, and rose to 30.24 ± 3.17 during follow-up; The CD-RISC score significantly increased from 56.38 ± 6.47 before intervention to 70.43 ± 6.82 after delayed testing. Discussion The intervention method of historical sculpture art therapy can effectively alleviate the anxiety symptoms of college students, enhance positive emotions, and strengthen psychological resilience. This intervention model not only effectively utilizes the therapeutic function of art, but also integrates the positive resources of historical culture. In the future, universities can combine local historical and cultural resources to develop similar courses in the mental health education system, and expand the accessibility and depth of interventions through digital technology. Funding No. FJ2024BF061.
Songchao Xia (Sun,) studied this question.