Psychological research on the relationship between spirituality/religion and mental health has grown considerably over the past several decades and now constitutes a sizable body of scholarship. Among dimensions of S/R, positive beliefs about God have been significantly related to better mental health outcomes, and conversely negative beliefs about God are generally associated with more distress. However, prior research on this topic has relied heavily upon self-report Likert-type scales, which are vulnerable to self-report biases and measure only explicit cognitive processes. In this study, we developed and validated an implicit social cognition task, the Positive/Negative God Go/No-go Association Task (PNG-GNAT), for use in psychological research on spirituality and religion (S/R). Preliminary evidence in a large sample (N = 381) suggests that the PNG-GNAT demonstrates internal consistency, test-retest and split-half reliability, and concurrent evidence of validity. Further, our results suggest that PNG-GNAT scores represent different underlying dimensions of S/R than explicit self-report measures, and incrementally predict mental health above and beyond self-report assessment. The PNG-GNAT appears to be an effective tool for measuring implicit positive/negative beliefs about God.

The present study examined the extent to which general religiousness moderated the relationship between religious coping and mental health in a sample of 572 Jewish adults. Hierarchical linear regression was utilized to examine interactions between religiousness and positive/negative religious coping and their effects on mental health. Results indicated that positive religious coping predicted higher subjective well-being, but not (higher or lower) depression or anxiety, and negative religious coping predicted lower subjective well-being, greater depression, and elevated anxiety. Surprisingly, general religiousnessregardless of how it was measured (e.g., religious practices, intrinsic religiosity, religious affiliation)did not moderate relationships between religious coping and mental health. These findings suggest that religious coping associates with mental health across the entire spectrum of religious involvement for Jews, highlighting that religious coping is an important mental health variable in this population, irrespective of individual religious differences.

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