Spiritual well-being and mental health in university students

The relationship between spirituality and depressive symptom severity, psychosocial functioning impairment, and quality of life: examining the impact of age, gender, and ethnic differences

“…In terms of gender, our results are consistent with previous research (Jafari et al, 2010;King et al, 2005) suggesting that women differed from men on both levels of spirituality and believing in God's presence, whereby women reported significantly higher levels of these constructs than men. Females were also more likely to have greater levels of psychosocial functioning related to depression.…”

“…This study also examined whether the observed relationships varied by age, gender, and ethnicity. The findings from this study regarding spirituality support previous investigations (Brown et al, 2013;Jafari et al, 2010;Young et al, 2000) in that spirituality was correlated with depressive symptoms. However, there was an unexpected finding in that there was a positive correlation between believing in God's presence and depressive symptoms.…”

“…Several investigations have indicated that women typically score higher on spirituality measures than men (Dennis, Muller, Miller, & Banerjee, 2004;Jafari et al, 2010;King, Cummings, & Whetstone, 2005;Wink & Dillon, 2002). However, Jafari et al's (2010) study has been the only study corroborating this among college students.…”

“…The authors indicated that spirituality was an important moderator of the relationship between negative life experiences and levels of depressive symptoms. Another investigation conducted by Jafari et al (2010) reported that spiritual well-being was negatively related to mental health and depressive symptoms measured by 5 items from the General Health Questionnaire-8 (Goldberg, 1972) in sample of 223 students from Allame Tabatabaei University of Tehran. These authors also indicated that spirituality was significantly higher in females than males.…”

Professors’ Attitudes Toward Considering Spirituality and Spiritual Counseling and Training During Medical Education Among Medical Students: A Qualitative Study

“…While spirituality can represent powerful sources of comfort, hope, coping, and meaning, they are often intricately entangled with psychopathology (Huguelet & Koenig, 2009). Considering the importance of spiritual health in people's life, especially in students' lives, assessment of this existential dimension as a powerful source of the students has been regarded (JAFARI, DEHSHIRI, NAJAFI, & SOHRABI, 2009); specially medical students who have always been vulnerable to stressful life conditions and intrapsychic challenges as a responsible for taking care of patients (Shaikh et al, 2004). Meanwhile, understanding the spiritual dimension of patients is very important for medical students (Nadereh Memaryan, Rassouli, Nahardani, & Amiri, 2015;C.…”