Worldview Under Stress: Preliminary Findings on Cardiovascular and Cortisol Stress Responses Predicted by Secularity, Religiosity, Spirituality, and Existential Search

Abstract

This study reports preliminary findings on the hypothesis that worldview can predict cardiovascular and cortisol responses to social stress. Based on theory and previous findings, we assumed that worldview security would provide a basis for stress resilience. Accordingly, religious and atheist individuals were expected to show higher stress resilience than spiritual and agnostic participants. Likewise, dimensional measures of religiosity and atheism were hypothesized to predict decreased, and existential search-indicating worldview insecurity-was hypothesized to predict increased physiological stress responses. Subjects included 50 university students who completed online questionnaires and took part in a standardized social stress test (Trier Social Stress Test). Systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP/ DBP), heart rate (HR), and salivary cortisol (SC) were assessed at baseline, immediately after stress testing, and during a forty-minute recovery period. Worldview comparisons revealed lower cardiovascular stress responses among religious than among atheist and spiritual participants and particularly high baseline SC among spiritual participants. Across the entire sample, existential search showed substantial positive correlations with SBP, HR, and SC stress parameters. The findings suggest that worldview security might partly explain the health benefits often associated with religion.

The existential dimension of the pandemic: Death attitudes, personal worldview, and coronavirus anxiety

“…Contrary to our expectations, coronavirus anxiety was not related, linearly or curvilinearly, to any of the worldview dimensions when sociodemographic variables were accounted for. This finding seems to contradict a number of previous studies on relationships between mental well-being and religiosity (Eliassen et al, 2005;Galen & Kloet, 2011;Hodapp & Zwingmann, 2019;Ross, 1990;Schnittker, 2001) as well as spirituality (King et al, 2013;Schnell, 2012;Schnell et al, 2020;Vittengl, 2018). However, our results might be related to the exceptional and unprecedented situation that the coronavirus pandemic poses and in which contextual variables might be more predictive for mental well-being than one's personal worldview.…”

“…It does not imply any specific positive beliefs (Schnell, 2015). Spirituality has been shown to be a searching and open orientation (Saroglou & Muñoz-Garc ıa, 2008;Schnell, 2012;Schnell et al, 2020) and thus represents a counterproposal to a firm and stable position. Death attitudes investigated in the present study are death anxiety, death avoidance, neutral acceptance (death as a natural and integral part of life), approach acceptance (the religious belief in a happy afterlife), and escape acceptance (death as a relief from pain and suffering; Wong et al, 1994).…”

“…However, because some previous studies, predominantly with US-American samples, found evidence for a curvilinear relationship between religiosity and psychological well-being (e.g., Eliassen et al, 2005;Galen & Kloet, 2011;Ross, 1990;Schnittker, 2001), mental distress due to COVID-19 might also be related curvilinearly to religiosity. As far as spirituality is concerned, there is increasing evidence that this, when understood as an idiosyncratic approach to transcendence, is more likely to be associated with negative mental health (King et al, 2013;Schnell, 2012;Schnell et al, 2020;Vittengl, 2018).…”

Worlds apart? Atheist, agnostic, and humanist worldviews in three European countries.

“…Viewing secular positions with respect to their decidedness versus openness is instructive, as several studies demonstrated that worldview decidedness is an important factor for mental health and coping with stress (Schnell et al, 2020; Weber et al, 2012). Research also suggests that it is necessary here to switch from categorical to dimensional assessment.…”

“…Existential search denotes an attitude of openness to questioning and changing one’s worldview, contrasting the certainty and closedness of dogmatism. Existential search has been shown to be more closely linked with spirituality than with religiosity, atheism, or agnosticism (Schnell et al, 2020), but no differences between atheism and agnosticism have been reported. Having measured existential quest, an operationalization of an openness to changing and questioning one’s worldview, Uzarevic et al (2021) found no difference in existential quest between atheists and agnostics.…”