Early adulthood, between 18 and 25, is viewed as a decisive period of life for the prevention and treatment of anxiety and depression. Although the topic of their mutual relationship is well-known, little has been uncovered about the mechanism underlying this connection. To understand the indirect pathways between anxiety and depression, we chose the sense of meaning of life as a mediator because people’s beliefs that their lives are or can be purposeful may protect against depression. The sample was composed of 277 Polish young adults. A small majority of the participants were women (58.8%). The mean age was M = 22.11 (SD = 1.72). We used in the research the Direct Behavior Rating-Scale Items Scale, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, and the Brief Screen for Depression. Correlational analysis showed that, consistent with past findings, anxiety correlated positively with depression and searching for meaning. It was also negatively associated with presence of meaning. Moreover, depression was negatively linked to presence of meaning and positively with searching for meaning. Regression-based mediation analyses (PROCESS macro 3.4) proved that the relationship between anxiety and depression was mediated by presence of meaning in life, suggesting that having a sense of meaning may be a pathway by which feelings of tension relative to adverse events protect against depression.

backgroundWe studied the relationships of self-discrepancies with private and public self-consciousness. It was postulated that private self-consciousness is more strongly related to actual-ideal discrepancy than to actual-ought discrepancy, and that the latter is more strongly related to public self-consciousness. participants and procedureThe sample consisted of 71 students aged 19-25, who completed the Self-Consciousness Scale and the DRP procedure for measuring self-discrepancies. resultsThe results did not confirm the hypotheses, but revealed a correlation between actual-ideal discrepancy and social anxiety. It also turned out that private self-consciousness negatively correlates with the time of rating ideal-self attributes and positively with the time of rating ought-self attributes.conclusions Self-consciousness may be related not so much to the size of self-discrepancies as to the accessibility of the content of each self-standard. The results are also consistent with the sequence of studies that challenge the central thesis of Higgins's theory concerning the specific relationship between actual-ought discrepancy and anxiety. key words social anxiety; public self-consciousness; private self-consciousness; self-discrepancy Private vs. public self-consciousness and self-discrepancies corresponding author -Adam Falewicz,

Divine engagement applies to a positive relationship with God in which people feel that God is close to them and answers their prayers. Divine disengagement pertains to an unsteady connection and a sense of God’s absence. Although several questionnaires consider the concerns of the human experience of prayer, only one deals precisely with the subject of the human perception of divine engagement and disengagement in response to one’s prayer. The main goals of the present research were to: (1) determine the latent structure of the Brief Measure of Perceived Divine Engagement and Disengagement in Response to Prayer (PDED) in a sample set; (2) test whether the factor structure indicated by EFA matches the data and provides an equivalent goodness-of-fit index to Exline’s model; and (3) confirm that perceived divine engagement and disengagement are correlated with religious meaning, gratitude to God, and dimensions of religious centrality. The results show that the proposed two-factor structure of the eight-item version of the PDED is a suitable and reliable solution of the original PDED (Study 1). Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) revealed a good fit of the data to the model in both the second and third studies. Both dimensions of the PDED correlated significantly with all of the subscales of the RMS, GGQ–6, and CRS–15. The Polish version of the PDED demonstrated very good psychometric properties.

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