Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping with Major Life Stressors
Religious coping, health and adjustment
This classic study attempts to identify positive and negative patterns of religious coping methods, develop a brief measure of these religious coping patterns and examine their implications for health and adjustment.
Positive religious coping
This study based in United States finds that religious coping can promote forgiveness, seeking spiritual support, collaborative religious coping, spiritual connection, religious purification, and benevolent religious reappraisal.
Negative religious coping
However, alongside this positive pattern of religious coping, the authors explore negative patterns of religious coping, consisting of spiritual discontent, punishing God reappraisals, interpersonal religious discontent, demonic reappraisal, and reappraisal of God’s powers. Although people make more use of the positive than that negative religious coping methods.
Comment:
This article from the field of psychology was produced by prominent US-based psychologists who have long been embedded in the field of religious coping with major life stress. It contributes to a large corpus, primarily based in the United States, affirming the links between (positive and negative) religious coping and mental health.
