DOI: 10.11648/j.si.20261404.13 ISSN: 2328-787X

Music Healing Empowering College Students' Mental Health: An Empirical Study

Xinghui Zhang
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Against the backdrop of surging mild emotional distress among contemporary college students and prominent structural dilemmas in traditional university mental health services including severe counselor-staff shortages, help-seeking stigma and poor intervention sustainability, this study takes music healing as a low-threshold preventive psychological empowerment approach and constructs a multi-level “physiological-psychological-social” regulatory mechanism grounded in neurologic music therapy, interoception theory and interpersonal synchrony theory. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was adopted, combining an 8-week randomized controlled group intervention and post-intervention semi-structured interviews. A total of 89 valid undergraduates and postgraduates with mild to moderate depressive tendencies were divided into an intervention group and a waitlist control group, with multiple psychological scales, partial physiological indicators and self-developed behavioral transfer questionnaires deployed to collect data at pre-intervention, post-intervention and four-week follow-up stages. Quantitative statistical results revealed that the structured four-stage music healing program significantly reduced participants’ depression, anxiety and stress levels, improved cognitive reappraisal ability, mindfulness awareness and social connectedness, and generated stable cross-scenario adaptive behavioral transfer effects that remained partially sustained one month after intervention. Qualitative thematic analysis further supplemented embodied, interpersonal and daily practical experience evidence to interpret the internal action paths of the theoretical model. This research innovatively shifts the research focus of music intervention from mere symptom relief to long-term psychological empowerment, systematically verifies the three parallel interactive regulatory pathways of music healing, and provides a complete operable group intervention protocol suitable for campus scenarios. The study also identifies limitations including single-school sample representativeness and insufficient synchronized physiological evidence, and proposes targeted directions for future neural mechanism exploration, culturally localized intervention development and university implementation science research. The findings offer solid theoretical support and practical guidelines for embedding standardized music healing modules into college mental health education and service systems.

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