Recognizing and understanding the potentially powerful roles that religiousness and spirituality (RS) may serve in the prevention and amelioration of disease, as well as symptom management and health related quality of life, significantly enhances research and clinical efforts across many areas of behavioral medicine. This article examines the knowledge established to date and suggests advances that remain to be made. We begin with a brief summary of the current knowledge regarding RS as related to three exemplary health conditions: (a) cardiovascular disease; (b) cancer; and, (c) substance abuse. We then focus on particular concerns for future investigations, emphasizing conceptual issues, possible mediators and moderators of relationships or effects, and methodology. Our discussion is framed by a conceptual model that may serve to guide and organize future investigations. This model highlights a number of important issues regarding the study of links between RS and health: (a) RS comprise many diverse constructs, (b) the mechanisms through which RS may influence health outcomes are quite diverse, and (c) a range of different types of health and health relevant outcomes may be influenced by RS. The multidimensional nature of RS and the complexity of related associations with different types of health relevant outcomes present formidable challenges to empirical study in behavioral medicine. These issues are referred to throughout our review and we suggest several solutions to the presented challenges in our summary. We end with a presentation of barriers to be overcome, along with strategies for doing so, and concluding thoughts.
An abundance of evidence supports that stress predicts poor health, and religiosity, broadly defined, typically predicts good health. It is possible that one mechanism by which religiosity positively impacts health is through reduction in or prevention of the stress response, and that Surrender (Surrender to God) is a measure that captures aspects of religiosity that would predict lowered stress levels. In the present investigation, two samples were studied in order to investigate the relationship between one characterization of religiosity (Surrender) and stress. Participants in Study 1 were 460 (306 female) Southern Appalachian undergraduate university students who completed the Surrender Scale (Wong-McDonald & Gorsuch, 2000) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI, Spielberger, 1983) online during spring 2009. Study 2 utilized a high-risk (low income and/or high pregnancy risk) sample of 230 pregnant women involved in a longitudinal study who completed the Surrender Scale and the Prenatal Psychosocial Profile (PPP, Curry, Campbell, & Christian, 1994), which contains an 11-item stress measure, during their first research contact early in pregnancy. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that Surrender was consistently inversely related to stress on both the STAI and the PPP. These findings contribute to the current understanding of the religiosity-health association in two ways. First, they offer support for Surrender and its associated lower stress levels to be explored as a mechanism by which religiosity influences health. Second, findings support the exploration of the potential for stress reduction through increasing Surrender in reportedly religious individuals.
The current investigation evaluated repertoires that may be related to performance on auditory-to-visual conditional discrimination training with 9 students who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The skills included in the assessment were matching, imitation, scanning, an auditory discrimination, and a visual discrimination. The results of the skills assessment showed that 4 participants failed to demonstrate mastery of at least 1 of the skills. We compared the outcomes of the assessment to the results of auditory-visual conditional discrimination training and found that training outcomes were related to the assessment outcomes for 7 of the 9 participants. One participant who did not demonstrate mastery of all assessment skills subsequently learned several conditional discriminations when blocked training trials were conducted. Another participant who did not demonstrate mastery of the auditory discrimination skill subsequently acquired conditional discriminations in 1 of the training conditions. We discuss the implications of the assessment for practice and suggest additional areas of research on this topic.
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