Spirituality and Personality: Understanding Their Relationship to Health Resilience

Abstract

A growing body of research suggests there are important relationships among spirituality, certain personality traits, and health (organismic) resilience. In the present study, 83 college students from two southeastern universities completed a demographic questionnaire, the NEO Five Factor Inventory, and the Resilience Questionnaire. The Organismic resilience and Relationship with something greater subscales of the Resilience Questionnaire were used for analyses. Health resilience was associated with four of the Big Five personality variables and the spirituality score. Health resilience was positively correlated with ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and spirituality and negatively correlated with neuroticism. Forty-three percent of the variance of the health resilience score was accounted for by two of the predictor variables: spirituality and neuroticism. These findings are consistent with the literature and provide further support for the idea that spirituality and health protective personality characteristics are related to and may promote better health resilience.

Investigating the Nexus Between Personality Traits and Islamic Work Ethics

“…Individuals higher on agreeableness make more social investments in work, family, religion, and other prosocial activities (Saadullah & Bailey, 2014). Agreeableness has also been found to relate highly to spirituality (Womble et al, 2013), religious values (Wisker & Rosinaite, 2016), and religiosity (Aghababaei, 2013). Individuals who have strong belief in spirituality and religiosity have been found to possess high agreeableness and conscientiousness (Aghababaei, Błachnio, Arji, Chiniforoushan, Tekke, & Mehrabadi, 2015).…”

Spirituality and Its Relationship with Personality in Depressed People: Preliminary Findings

“…Most of the research that is so far made in general population and using NEO-PI/Five factor model of personality, showed mixed results. Womble showed that spirituality and neuroticism shared 43 % of variance of resilience in college students (Womble et al 2013), similar as in work of Lockenhoff in HIV population (Löckenhoff et al 2009). Johnstone stated that spiritual variables add little to mental health in the sample of individuals with different faith traditions (Johnstone et al 2012).…”

Global personal spirituality: Concept, measurement, and correlates across cultures

“…Previous research has suggested that religiosity and spirituality are related to several psychological traits (Gartner, ; Labbe & Fobes, ; Womble et al, ). We examined the relationship between spirituality and two traits (self‐confidence and personal control) and found that spirituality affects peoples’ behavior.…”

“…Although personal spirituality could potentially be related to many variables in different areas, we sought to identify a few key variables as potential correlates of personal spirituality that could help us demonstrate predictive validity of the personal spirituality construct. Many researchers have investigated the relationship between spirituality and other variables including demographic variables (e.g., Shahabi et al, 2002;Zinnbauer et al, 1997), psychological traits (Labbe & Fobes, 2010;Womble, Labbe, & Cochran, 2013), and specific behaviors (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011). In this study, we wanted to test for the validity of the new personal spirituality scale by specifically examining its correlates across countries.…”