This study, a first in comparing HPV educational formats, suggests that both written and video interventions are equally effective in educating about HPV and increasing young adults' vaccination intentions.

Differences between correlates of vaccination intentions and uptake suggest that social influences of liked and trusted individuals may make an important and unique contribution in motivating young women to receive the HPV vaccine beyond other variables from the HBM and TPB. Future utilization of longitudinal designs is needed to understand which factors may cause individuals to decide to receive the HPV vaccine.

While the field of empirical study on religion and spirituality in relation to mental health has rapidly expanded over the past decade, little is known about underlying dimensions of spirituality cross-culturally conceived. We aimed to bridge this gap by inductively deriving potential universal dimensions of spirituality through a large-scale, multi-national data collection, and examining the relationships of these dimensions with common psychiatric conditions. Five-thousand five-hundred and twelve participants from China, India, and the United States completed a two-hour online survey consisting of wide-ranging measures of the lived experience of spirituality, as well as clinical assessments. A series of inductive Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and cross-validating Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) were conducted to derive common underlying dimensions of spirituality. Logistic regression analyses were then conducted with each dimension to predict depression, suicidal ideation, generalized anxiety, and substance-related disorders. Preliminary EFA results were consistently supported by ESEM findings. Analyses of 40 spirituality measures revealed five invariant factors across countries which were interpreted as five dimensions of universal spiritual experience, specifically: love, in the fabric of relationships and as a sacred reality; unifying interconnectedness, as a sense of energetic oneness with other beings in the universe; altruism, as a commitment beyond the self with care and service; contemplative practice, such as meditation, prayer, yoga, or qigong; and religious and spiritual reflection and commitment, as a life well-examined. Love, interconnectedness, and altruism were associated with less risk of psychopathology for all countries. Religious and spiritual reflection and commitment and contemplative practice were associated with less risk in India and the United States but associated with greater risk in China. Education was directly associated with dimensions of spiritual awareness in India and China but inversely associated with dimensions in the United States. Findings support the notion that spirituality is a universal phenomenon with potentially universal dimensions. These aspects of spirituality may each offer protective effects against psychiatric symptoms and disorders and suggest new directions for treatment.

No abstract

Spirituality has been identified in the research literature as inversely associated with symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation. Whether or not this association might be culturally and religiously bound within Judeo-Christian Western traditions, or more universally human, has yet to be examined. As a step toward exploring universality, we investigated whether the inverse association between spirituality and depression is found, and perhaps relatively stable in magnitude, across 3 religiously and culturally diverse cultures: the United States, China, and India. Our study sample included 5,512 participants (41% women, mean age 29 years, age range 18 -75 years) from the United States (N ϭ 1,499), China (N ϭ 3,150), and India (N ϭ 863). Scales used to assess personal spirituality included the Delaney Spirituality Scale (a phenomenological scale) and Daily Spiritual Experience subscale from the Fetzer Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness and Spirituality (a more theistic scale). Severity of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation were assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). A high level of personal spirituality decreased by half the relative risk of moderate depression across all 3 countries-United States, China, and India. The findings were consistent using a phenomenological conceptualization for spirituality, but true only for India and United States for a theistic conceptualization. Spirituality in phenomenological terms was protective against suicidal ideation across all 3 countries, with a theistic conceptualization protective only in the United States. Findings were interpreted as pointing to the possibility of universal phenomenological spirituality as protective against depression.