Psychological Resilience as a Pathway Between Community-Engaged Rural Art Practice and University Students’ Well- Being and Distress

Purpose University students face academic pressure, interpersonal challenges, and future uncertainty, making psychological well-being an important concern in higher education. Community-engaged rural art practice may provide opportunities for emotional expression, cultural meaning-making, social connection, and adaptive coping. However, its associations with students' well-being and psychological distress, as well as the underlying mechanism, remain insufficiently examined. This study examined the relationship between community-engaged rural art practice and university students' psychological well-being and distress, focusing on the mediating role of psychological resilience. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted among university students. Participants completed measures of community-engaged rural art practice, psychological resilience, psychological well-being, depression, anxiety, and stress. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, group comparison, hierarchical regression, and bootstrap mediation analysis were used to examine the relationships among the main variables. Results Community-engaged rural art practice was positively associated with psychological resilience (r = 0.43, p < 0.001) and psychological well-being (r = 0.44, p < 0.001), and negatively associated with depression (r = -0.44, p < 0.001), anxiety (r = -0.24, p < 0.001), and stress (r = -0.43, p < 0.001). Students with higher engagement reported stronger psychological resilience, higher well-being, and lower psychological distress. Hierarchical regression showed that rural art practice remained significantly associated with psychological well-being, depression, anxiety, and stress after controlling for demographic and educational variables. Mediation analysis indicated that psychological resilience partially mediated the associations between rural art practice and psychological well-being, depression, and stress, while the association with anxiety operated mainly through resilience. Conclusion These findings provide preliminary cross-sectional evidence that community-engaged rural art practice is associated with more favorable psychological outcomes among university students. Psychological resilience may be an important positive psychological resource linking rural art practice engagement with higher well-being and lower distress. From a positive psychology perspective, socially engaged rural art practice may offer a meaningful educational context for cultivating resilience, adaptive coping, and student well-being. Given the convenience sampling strategy and cross-sectional design, the findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects.