Approximately 20% of older adults are diagnosed with depression in the United States. Extant research suggests that engagement in religious activity, or religiosity, may serve as a protective factor ...against depression. This prospective study examines whether religiosity protects against depression and/or aids in recovery.
Study data are drawn from the 2006 and 2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study. The sample consists of 1,992 depressed and 5,740 nondepressed older adults (mean age = 68.12 years), at baseline (2006), for an overall sample size of 7,732. Logistic regressions analyzed the relationship between organizational (service attendance), nonorganizational (private prayer), and intrinsic measures of religiosity and depression onset (in the baseline nondepressed group) and depression recovery (in the baseline depressed group) at follow-up (2008), controlling for other baseline factors.
Religiosity was found to both protect against and help individuals recover from depression. Individuals not depressed at baseline remained nondepressed 2 years later if they frequently attended religious services, whereas those depressed at baseline were less likely to be depressed at follow-up if they more frequently engaged in private prayer.
Findings suggest that both organizational and nonorganizational forms of religiosity affect depression outcomes in different circumstances (i.e., onset and recovery, respectively). Important strategies to prevent and relieve depression among older adults may include improving access and transportation to places of worship among those interested in attending services and facilitating discussions about religious activities and beliefs with clinicians.
Analytic cognitive style (ACS) has usually been found to be negatively correlated with religiosity. Several recent studies, however, challenged this finding claiming, for example, that the presumed ...association is an artifact of the order of presentation of the ACS and religiosity measures or that ACS might be differently related to different types of religiosity. Furthermore, almost all data in this field of research come from Western Christian samples. We, therefore, investigated whether ACS is related to four types of religiosity (intrinsic, extrinsic, quest, and general religious belief) and whether this relation stems from an order effect in three different studies with four different non-western samples (total n=1329). The results reveal that there is no order effect and that ACS is negatively correlated to intrinsic/extrinsic religiosity and general religious belief, corroborating initial findings. Additionally, we found a positive correlation between ACS and quest religiosity. The results point to the importance of distinguishing different types of religiosity in religiosity-cognitive style studies.
•We investigated the relation between analytic cognitive style (ACS) and religiosity in Turkey.•Intrinsic/extrinsic and general religiosity are negatively correlated with ACS.•Quest religiosity is positively correlated with ACS.•Results point to the importance of individual differences in religiosity.
There is a consensus among scientists that climate change is an existing, growing, and human-made threat to our planet. The topic is a divisive issue worldwide, including among people of faith. ...Little research has focused on the relationship between (non)religious belief and climate change. Hence, in Studies 1 and 2, the authors explore the impact of religious/non-religious orientations: intrinsic (religion as an end in itself), extrinsic (religion as a means to an end), quest (a journey toward religious understanding), and non-religious orientation (i.e., atheistic) on consumer attitudes toward the environment, focusing on recycling advertisements with (non)religious cues. Further, in Study 3, we examine the underlying causal mechanism of environmental identity and the moderating effect of political views on consumers’ lack of belief in climate change. The results show that religious people are less committed to the environment and climate change and that atheism positively affects recycling and climate change identity. The findings offer practical implications in that advertising campaigns need to be endorsed by religious leaders and channeled within the confines of the religious institutions they represent.
Religiosity is a multidimensional construct known to influence the occurrence of hallucinations. However, it remains unknown how different religiosity types affect clinically relevant ...phenomenological features of hallucinations. Therefore, we wished to explore associations between intrinsic and extrinsic (non-organizational and organizational) religiosity and hallucinations severity, distress or impact on daily function in a non-clinical Muslim population. We recruited a representative sample of full-time students at Qatar's only national university via systematic random sampling and administered the Questionnaire of Psychotic Experiences online. The study design was cross-sectional. Using structural equation modeling, we estimated effects of the religiosity types on hallucinations severity, distress or impact on daily function in the past week while accounting for sociodemographic variables, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and, delusions. Extrinsic non-organizational religiosity (ENORG) was associated with experiencing reduced distress or impact on daily function from hallucinations both directly and indirectly through intrinsic religiosity. In contrast, extrinsic non-organizational religiosity (EORG) was associated with increased hallucinations distress or impact albeit only through higher intrinsic religiosity. We found no association between any religiosity types and hallucinations severity. Younger and married participants from lower socio-economic class had comparatively more severe hallucinations and more distress from them. Qatari nationality was positively associated EORG and negatively associated with hallucinations distress or impact. Evidence of differential associations between the religiosity types, socioeconomic and cultural groups, and distress or impact from past week's hallucinations supports the importance of alignment between religious, mental health, and well-being education.
Although there has been considerable theoretical support outlining a positive relationship between religiosity and voluntary simplicity, there is limited empirical evidence validating this ...relationship. This study examines the relationships among religious orientations (Allport and Ross in J Pers Soc Psychol 5(4):432-443, 1967) and voluntary simplicity in a sample of Australian consumers. The results demonstrate that intrinsic religiosity is positively related to voluntary simplicity; however, there is no relationship between extrinsic religiosity and voluntary simplicity. Furthermore, this research investigates the processes through which intrinsic religiosity affects voluntary simplicity. The relationship between intrinsic religiosity and voluntary simplicity is sequentially mediated by communal/personal wellbeing and environmental well-being. The findings not only identify a prosocial role of intrinsic religiosity in motivating voluntary simplicity, but also indicate that secular pursuits that enhance communal/personal well-being and environmental well-being may also motivate voluntary simplicity.
Mono-cultural studies have demonstrated that individual religiosity buffers the negative relationship between perceived injustice and personal well-being. However, it is unclear whether this ...relationship holds as strongly across societies with varying levels of cultural religiosity. We argue that higher levels of societal religiosity provide a cultural context that reduces pressure on its members to ameliorate societal injustice and consequently attenuates the link between injustice and an individual's satisfaction with life. To test this hypothesis, we assessed representative citizens from 136 societies with varying levels of religiosity, individual perceptions of societal injustice, and satisfaction with life. Using multi-level modeling on responses from 362,340 respondents, while controlling for societal wealth and societal freedom, we found that the relationship between injustice and life satisfaction was pan-societal but also that it was weaker at higher levels of societal religiosity. We explain this attenuation effect by arguing that sociocultural contexts higher in religiosity provide a worldview and set of value priorities that support their members to disengage from concerns about secular affairs and orient their concerns towards transcendent issues, deriving their satisfaction from less worldly pursuits.
•We examined the relationship between perceived injustice and life satisfaction globally.•We also examined whether personal and societal religiosity moderated this relationship.•Societal religiosity (but not personal religiosity) was a significant moderator.•The relationship was weaker in more (vs. less) religious countries.
A wide range of survey-based tools has been developed to measure religiosity, although the mostcommonly applied approaches tend to focus on ‘generic’ interpretations of religiosity for practicaland ...generalising reasons. However, these generic approaches have not always been satisfactorydue to the lack of variation in responses and the potential for poor correlation between the genericreligiosity measure and the overall impact of faith in respondents’ lives, particularly in less secularcontexts. This led us to explore whether there is a difference between measuring religiosity usinga ‘generic’ versus a ‘mature’ approach using 227 Christian respondents on Bantayan Island, thePhilippines. The findings suggest that overall religiosity among our respondents was high for bothmeasures, that the measures are strongly correlated, and that there was no statistically significantdifference between the scores for each scale; however, there was evidence to suggest that the twoscales are examining different dimensions of religiosity. When correlating the two religiosityscores to other scales on our survey, there was no statistically significant difference among the correlationswhen using the mature or generic measure of religiosity. This has important implicationsfor mental health and care research methodologies, for which we highlight the importance of usingcontextually appropriate measures that incorporate various dimensions of religiosity.
For almost 50 years, psychologists have been theorizing about and measuring religiosity essentially the way Gordon Allport did, when he distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. ...However, there is a historical debate regarding what this scale actually measures, which items should be included, and how many factors or subscales exist. To provide more definitive answers, we estimated a series of confirmatory factor analysis models comparing four competing theories for how to score Gorsuch and McPherson’s commonly used measure of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. We then formally investigated measurement invariance across U.S. Protestants, Irish Catholics, and Turkish Muslims and across U.S. Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims. We provide evidence that a five-item version of intrinsic religiosity is invariant across the U.S. samples and predicts less warmth toward atheists and gay men/lesbians, validating the scale. Our results suggest that a variation of Gorsuch and McPherson’s measure may be appropriate for some but not all uses in cross-cultural research.
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