With the increasing pressure on college students in terms of study, work, emotion, and life, the emotional changes of college students are becoming more and more obvious. For college student management workers, if they can accurately grasp the emotional state of each college student in all aspects of the whole process, it will be of great help to student management work. The traditional way to understand students’ emotions at a certain stage is mostly through chats, questionnaires, and other methods. However, data collection in this way is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the authenticity of the collected data cannot be guaranteed because students will lie out of impatience or unwillingness to reveal their true emotions. In order to explore an accurate and efficient emotion recognition method for college students, more objective physiological data are used for emotion recognition research. Since emotion is generated by the central nervous system of the human brain, EEG signals directly reflect the electrophysiological activity of the brain. Therefore, in the field of emotion recognition based on physiological signals, EEG signals are favored due to their ability to intuitively respond to emotions. Therefore, a deep neural network (DNN) is used to classify the collected emotional EEG data and obtain the emotional state of college students according to the classification results. Considering that different features can represent different information of the original data, in order to express the original EEG data information as comprehensively as possible, various features of the EEG are first extracted. Second, feature fusion is performed on multiple features using the autosklearn model integration technique. Third, the fused features are input to the DNN, resulting in the final classification result. The experimental results show that the method has certain advantages in public datasets, and the accuracy of emotion recognition exceeds 88%. This proves the used emotion recognition is feasible to be applied in real life.

Stress is an unavoidable problem for today’s college students. Stress can arouse strong personal emotional and behavioral responses. Compared with other groups of the same age, college students have a special way of life and living environment. They have complex interpersonal relationships and relatively weak social support systems. At the same time, they also face fierce competition in both academic and employment. However, they lack the skills to deal with the crisis and are reluctant to ask others for help, which leads to a simultaneous increase in mental stress. The pressure on college students mainly comes from study, family, social, employment, society, and economy. When students face multiple pressures from family, school, society, etc., some students are prone to some psychological problems due to their own personality or external environment and other reasons. Therefore, regular assessment of students’ stress status is an important means to prevent college students’ psychological problems. Considering that in real life, the number of students whose pressure is within the tolerable range is the majority, while the number of students who are under too much pressure is a minority. Therefore, the actual dataset to be identified belongs to a kind of imbalanced data. In this study, an improved extreme learning machine (IELM) is used to improve the performance of the recognition model as much as possible. IELM takes the idea of label weighting as the starting point, introduces the AdaBoost algorithm, and combines its weight distribution with the label weighted extreme learning machine (ELM). During the weight update process, the advantage of the imbalanced nature of multi-label datasets is taken. IELM was used to classify EEG data to determine the stress level of college students. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm used in this study has excellent classification performance and can accurately assess students’ stress levels. The accurate assessment of stress has provided a solid foundation for the development of students’ mental health and has significant practical implications.