Religious coping with interpersonal hurts: Psychosocial correlates of the brief RCOPE in four non-Western countries.

Abstract

Religious coping has emerged as a guiding paradigm for understanding ways in which religion shapes how people adapt to life’s most difficult experiences. Although research on religious coping has advanced substantially over the last two decades, there has been a disproportionate focus on noninterpersonal stressors with samples from predominantly Western societies. In this study, we draw on a relational spirituality perspective to examine religious coping in the aftermath of interpersonal hurts among participants from four non-Western countries. With samples from Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Ukraine (N = 3,244), we examined associations of religious coping (as measured by the Brief RCOPE) with anxiety, depression, perceived posttraumatic growth, and well-being. The general patterns that emerged from the country-specific analyses of psychosocial correlates indicated that positive religious coping evidenced its strongest associations with indices of positive functioning (i.e., perceived posttraumatic growth and well-being), whereas negative religious coping yielded its strongest associations with indices of psychological distress (i.e., anxiety and depression). Hierarchical regressions for each country indicated that the dimensions of religious coping were incrementally associated with all indices of functioning, over and above variance explained by state forgiveness. Overall, the findings were largely comparable to those of prior research with samples from Western societies. Further cross-cultural research is needed to extend our understanding of the role of religious/spiritual coping in dealing with negative life events, particularly in non-Western cultures.

International REACH forgiveness intervention: a multisite randomised controlled trial

“…Pilot data involving most of the sites included in this study suggest that among the most common types of transgressions that participants tend to describe are inappropriate communication or harassment (14.1%), sabotage of social connections or defamation of reputation (8.6%), and accusations or moral affronts (7.5%), and that friends (17.9%), romantic partners or spouses (16.7%), and non-spouse family members (14.4%) are among the most frequently identified perpetrators of recalled transgressions. 12 Patient and public involvement Results will be disseminated to study participants after publication and the self-guided workbook will be made freely and publicly available in all languages into which it has been translated for the study. However, participants were not otherwise involved in the design of the study.…”

Do Forgiveness Campaign Activities Improve Forgiveness, Mental Health, and Flourishing?

“…Forgiveness might be understood as a process involving two related dimensions, a decision to treat the offender as a more valued and valuable person (decisional forgiveness) and replacement of negative unforgiving emotions with positive other oriented emotions like empathy, sympathy, compassion, and love (emotional forgiveness) [9]. In Colombia, forgiveness might be needed as a result of transgressions encountered during 60 years of civil conflict [10] plus more common transgressions [11]. Evidence on the effects of large-scale interventions on forgiveness and mental health is lacking.…”