The COVID-19 pandemic not only seriously threatens the health of contemporary college students, but also causes the spread of negative psychology to a certain extent, leading to the occurrence of depression. Positive psychology advocates to deal with psychological problems with a positive attitude. The study takes the COVID-19 as the background to explore the impact of positive psychology education on depressed college students.

116 college students suffering from depression were randomly selected from a university in China, and their negative psychological conditions were evaluated with Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS), and statistics were made. Then the positive psychology education intervention was carried out for these college students for 2 months. After the intervention, the negative psychological situation was evaluated again by SDS scale and compared with that before the intervention.

Table 1 showed the evaluation results of depression college students before and after positive psychological education intervention. It can be found that after the intervention of positive psychology education, students’ depression scores decreased significantly, and their negative psychology eased significantly, with a statistically significant difference (P < 0.05).Table 1.

Evaluation results of depression undergraduates before and after positive psychological education intervention

Under the COVID-19, the negative psychology of college students has seriously affected their normal life and study, and a considerable number of students are suffering from depression. The study intervened the negative psychology of college students through positive psychology education, and evaluated it through SDS scale. The results showed that the negative psychology of college students was significantly improved after the intervention, indicating that positive psychology education can effectively alleviate college students’ depression, and has certain clinical application value.