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A Paradigm to Assess Implicit Attitudes towards God: The Positive/Negative God Associations Task

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Avoidant attachment to God negatively loaded on this factor.

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Funding

This study was funded by private donations to the McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School Development Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Social Work, Touro College, 27 West 23rd Street, New York, NY, 10010, USA

    Steven Pirutinsky

  2. Center for Anxiety, New York, NY, USA

    Steven Pirutinsky, Sean Carp & David H. Rosmarin

  3. Maclean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA, USA

    David H. Rosmarin

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  1. Steven Pirutinsky
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  2. Sean Carp
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Correspondence to Steven Pirutinsky.

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Conflict of interest

Dr. Steven Pirutinsky declares that he has no conflict of interest. Sean Carp declares that he has no conflict of interest. Dr. David H. Rosmarin declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

No animals were involved in this study, and this article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This study was approved by the IRB of McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in this study.

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Pirutinsky, S., Carp, S. & Rosmarin, D.H. A Paradigm to Assess Implicit Attitudes towards God: The Positive/Negative God Associations Task. J Relig Health 56, 305–319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-016-0303-y

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