Religiosity And Anxiety Research

The Correlation Between Religiosity and Anxiety Among College Students Overwhelmingly, throughout the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the number of college students who are diagnosed and treated for anxiety related issues (American College Health Association, 2015). Currently, around 15.8% of college students in the United States have been diagnosed or treated for some form of anxiety, while an increasing 21.9% report that anxiety has negatively affected their schooling within the past year (American College Health Association, 2015). It is this increase in anxiety related symptoms that calls for better and effective coping methods for college aged adolescents in order to reduce the level of perceived stress. One method
that psychologists have recently started to develop and research is the affect of religiosity on anxiety (Khalaf, Hebborn, Dal, & Naja, 2015). Religiosity, in this case, refers to the overarching belief, commitment, and participation in ones religion. Past research that has investigated the affects of religion on anxiety have been contradictory, and as a result many psychologists are undecided about the true effects and limitations that an individual’s religion plays on their anxiety. For instance, in “A critical comprehensive review of religiosity and anxiety disorders in adults” by Khalaf, Hebborn, Dal, and Naja, the researchers analyzed ten significant articles for a literature review, in order to see how current experiments explored the link between spirituality and different forms of anxiety, such as: generalized anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, personality disorders, and phobic disorders (2015).
Their comprehensive literature review found that out of the ten studies analyzed, only 40% of the studies indicated that religiosity was a factor in reducing generalized anxiety, and only 10% of studies demonstrated the negative correlation between religiosity and post traumatic stress, personality disorders, and phobias. Meanwhile, their analysis also found that the other studies indicated either no significant correlation between religiosity and the decrease in anxiety or even demonstrated a positive correlation between the
two. This study aimed to demonstrate through their review how previous studies provided varied results between the variables of religiosity and anxiety. This study is helpful for the overall understanding of the relationship between these two variable because it tells the audience how there have been results for positive, negative, and no correlation between religiosity and the various disorders of anxiety. However, even though this review demonstrates a portion of the contradictory articles encompassing these two topics, the review only focuses on ten articles. This limited amount of information creates a greater skew in results as a result of the small sample size compared to the total population of articles. Meanwhile, in order to fully comprehend more about the interplay between the occurrences of trait anxiety and religiosity, the study “Approaches to religiosity related to anxiety among college students” by Harris, Schoneman, and Carrera (2002) demonstrates through a series of surveys that higher scores on commitment, a feeling of relation to a religious community, service attendance, and frequent prayer lead to overall lower scores of trait anxiety. The researchers were able to discover this correlation by giving 85 undergraduate a survey that was composed up of questions referring to what their religion was, how often they reported praying, their average church attendance, as well as several various religiosity scales. Including the Prayer Function Scale, Anxiety Control Questionnaire, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Religious Commitment Inventory, Scriptural Literalism Scale, and Fowler Religious Attitudes Scale. However, one problem with this studies results is that the demographics gathered from their study is not generalizable to the overall population. For instance, this study was mainly composed of Caucasian participants, with few minority members. For this reason, the study does not hold external validity, and thus more research with a representative sample must be completed. However, despite the results listed in the study above, the experiment “Anxiety, depression and students' religiosity” by Jansen, Motely, and Hovey (2010) conveys how only certain aspects of religiousness, such as service attendance, combat anxiety. These results were obtained by measuring participant’s anxiety and depression levels using the Beck Anxiety Inventory and the Beck Depression Inventory, while religiosity was measured by asking questions about church attendance and church influence. However, the problem with this study is that… Moreover, to further the idea between the correlation between religious practices and anxiety, “A Preliminary Study of the Acute Effects of Religious Ritual on Anxiety” by Anastasi and Newberg (2008), analyzes the relationship between religious rituals, such as the rosary, compared to religious videos, in the affect in the reduction of state and trait anxiety.
The researchers employed this study by selecting 12 Catholic college students that prayed the Rosary everyday and 18 Catholic students who did not pray the Rosary on a daily basis. Next, these two groups were given the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and after words they were asked to either pray the rosary or watch a religious video, dependent on their previous experience. Lastly, students were again given the STAI, and then their results were compared. The problem with this study is that it is not generalizable to the total population due to its relatively small sample size and the fact that all participants were Catholic
students. These studies provide overwhelming evidence that the study between religiosity and the various types of anxiety is heavily disputed and even those that agree the two are negatively correlated argue its correlation due to alternate reasons. For instance, Khalaf, Hebborn, Dal, and Naja’s study provides important findings such as the alternating opinions between how the overarching term religiosity can affect the various types of anxiety that people are diagnosed with (2015). Additionally, the Harris, Schoneman, and Carrera study demonstrates how one’s trait anxiety is influenced by church attendance, prayer, and one’s own cognitive impression of how committed and close they feel with their religion and community members (2002). While, on the other hand, both the Jansen, Motely, and Hovey (2010) and Anastasi and Newberg (2008) studies focus on how religious rituals, such as church attendance and the rosary can impact a participants trait anxiety. Overwhelmingly, each of these sources effects our study of religiosity and anxiety because the correlation and study of these variables are both new to psychology. And even though there are more studies that articulate these differences in findings between the two variables, they often do not define anxiety and have non-generalizable results (Khalaf, Hebborn, Dal, & Naja, 2015). However, despite all of this research and its importance to our study, there is still a large gap in the literature related to this topic. These three studies and literature review all analyze anxiety in different terms, whether it trait anxiety or the various disorders of anxiety. However, they never discuss the affect of religiosity on the general symptoms of anxiety participants feel or a participants state anxiety. Our group is interested in assessing the amount of anxiety and stress that college students feel due to everyday situations, rather than anxiety disorders and they overall trait anxiety. We believe that this is of great benefit to our research because many college students experience stress, and over 20% of college students experience negative anxiety that negatively impacts them (American College Health Association, 2015). Moreover, in all of these studies, religiosity focuses on a broad all encompassing definition that includes their beliefs, the frequency of their church attendance and prayer, religious rituals, and commitment to their religion. However, our group is more interested in obtaining information about college student’s cognitive perception of their own religiosity. We believe that while all these factors that were analyzed in previous studies are important, we are more interested in studying perceptions. We are interested in student’s perceptions of how religious they are because we believe that the more participants feel included and put emphasis on and within their own religious group will correspond with a lower feeling of state and symptoms of anxiety. Overall, we believe that this in-group may provide students with better coping methods and ways to release their anxiety, through rituals and other activities, that just perceiving yourself as religious and thus with this group will make you feel less anxious. Therefore, our group hypothesizes that college students who perceive themselves as religious will be more likely to have a lesser extent of anxiety symptoms than students who are not religious or do not have any religious affiliation.