Pathways to Empowering Student Mental Health Education and Enhancing Innovation Capability Through Positive Psychology Approaches

In response to the mental health issues caused by diverse factors such as rapid societal development, including higher psychological pressure but limited stress management abilities among many students especially graduate students, as well as the demands of the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) for enhancing students' innovation capabilities, this study delves into the pathways of applying positive psychology approaches to empower student mental health education, consequently, to foster the improvement of students' innovation abilities with the ecosystem composed of the school, mentors and graduate students in high collaboration. First, the mechanisms through which positive psychology approaches empower mental health education and enhance innovation capabilities are analyzed. Next, a positive and pleasant learning and living environment is created to enable students to gain positive emotional experiences, develop positive personalities, achieve wise management of stress and emotions, and enhance intrinsic motivation and efficiency for learning. Finally, students are guided to efficiently utilize AI tools to raise high-quality and relevant questions, analyze questions thereby solve complex questions, therefore their innovation capabilities are improved. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been validated through course teaching, guidance in research projects, and participation in scientific innovation competitions etc. Research results over the past 20 years involving more than 2,000 graduate students in China University of Petroleum (East China) demonstrate that the proposed methods have effectively improved the outcomes of students mental health education, improved the mental health level and sense of happiness of students, and significantly promoted the development of their innovation capabilities.