Perceptions of Divine Forgiveness, Religious Comfort, and Depression in Psychiatric Inpatients: A Mixed Methods Study.

Understanding how forgiveness relates to mental health outcomes may improve clinical care. This study assessed 248 adult psychiatric inpatients, testing associations of forgiveness, religious comfort (RC), religious strain (RS), and changes in depressive symptomatology from admission to discharge. Experiencing divine forgiveness and self-forgiveness was both directly associated with RC and inversely associated with RS.

Religiousness, meaning, and quality of life: Test of a mediational model among adults seeking a spiritually integrated inpatient program.

Objective: Religious beliefs and practices may augment a sense of meaning in life that could support quality of life (QOL) in physical, social, and emotional domains amid mental health crises. However, these associations have not been thoroughly tested among persons with serious mental illness (SMI).

Methods: Focusing on 248 adults who had recently enrolled in a spiritually integrated acute psychiatric hospitalization program, we incorporated structural equation modeling to examine whether (1) religiousness would be associated with better overall QOL; and (2) inpatients' sense of meaning in life would at least partially account for the religiousness-QOL link.

Spiritual struggles and mental health outcomes in a spiritually integrated inpatient program.

Background: Persons contending with serious mental health difficulties often experience struggles with religious faith and/or spirituality that may also demand clinical attention. However, research has not examined the relative importance of specific forms of spiritual struggles in mental health status or treatment outcomes of psychiatric patients.

Methods: Focusing on 217 adults who completed a spiritually integrated inpatient program, this study examined (1) which struggles in Exline et al.

God imagery and affective outcomes in a spiritually integrative inpatient program.

Religion and/or spirituality (R/S) can play a vital, multifaceted role in mental health. While beliefs about God represent the core of many psychiatric patients' meaning systems, research has not examined how internalized images of the divine might contribute to outcomes in treatment programs/settings that emphasize multicultural sensitivity with R/S. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative information with a religiously heterogeneous sample of 241 adults who completed a spiritually integrative inpatient program over a two-year period, this study tested direct/indirect associations between imagery of how God views oneself, religious comforts and strains, and affective outcomes (positive and negative).

Registered Replication Report: Study 1 From Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, & Hannon (2002).

Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, and Hannon (2002, Study 1) demonstrated a causal link between subjective commitment to a relationship and how people responded to hypothetical betrayals of that relationship. Participants primed to think about their commitment to their partner (high commitment) reacted to the betrayals with reduced exit and neglect responses relative to those primed to think about their independence from their partner (low commitment). The priming manipulation did not affect constructive voice and loyalty responses.

Insufficient Justification for Exclusion Prompts Compensatory Behavior.

This experiment examined participants' compensatory behavior toward an excluded stranger. Participants engaged in a four-person social introductions task and rank-ordered each other member of the group; the lowest ranked person was excluded from a subsequent game. Using a 2 × 2 design, participants were randomly assigned to a justification condition (insufficient vs.