Appreciation of art works is a popular optional course in Chinese colleges. From the perspective of pedagogy and cognitive psychology, this paper aims to disclose the influence of the folk-art appreciation on the mental health of college students. First, an activity model and a plan were developed for the folk-art appreciation. Then, 600 students in a college of Henan Province, China, were surveyed. Their mental health levels were evaluated by Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS). On this basis, 70 college students were selected for contrastive experiment, using the designed plan for folk-art appreciation. The results show that folk-art appreciation activities can effectively alleviate the depressive symptoms of college students, especially the mild depressive symptoms, thus enhancing their mental health. The research findings enrich the knowledge on mental health education of college students.