Perceived relationships with God can be a source of comfort or struggle. To advance the study of spiritual comfort and struggle, we develop the nine-item Attitudes toward God Scale (ATGS-9), and we describe six studies (2,992 total participants) reporting its development and psychometrics. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified two factors: (1) Positive Attitudes toward God and (2) Disappointment and Anger with God. Subscale scores showed good estimated internal consistency, 2-week temporal stability, and evidence for construct and discriminant validity. Positive Attitudes toward God correlated with measures of religiosity and conscientiousness. Disappointment and Anger with God correlated with negative religious coping, lower religious participation, more distress, higher neuroticism, and entitlement. These results support the ATGS-9 as a brief measure of attitudes toward God.

With a move from lecture-based to interactive teaching approaches, students are encouraged in a variety of ways to share personal experiences in classroom settings. Among those self-disclosures, students may speak about their mental health concerns or diagnoses. The purpose of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of what it is like for students to listen to mental health self-disclosures in a classroom. In order to do so, undergraduate college students (N = 21) were interviewed and asked to describe their experiences, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors associated with hearing self-disclosures of mental health concerns in classrooms. A phenomenological qualitative research method was used to analyze the data. By interviewing students, it was possible to identify themes regarding their experiences, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors associated with hearing mental health self-disclosures. Study findings included themes of concern, discomfort, interest, respect, indifference, and enhanced understanding. The description of student perceptions of mental health self-disclosures will be beneficial to educators who encounter mental health self-disclosures in their classrooms. Implications for teaching are discussed.

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