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Assessing the relationships among spiritual social support, stress, and anxiety: Does extraversion also play a role in the coping process?

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Abstract

Research indicates that people with strong social support networks tend to cope more effectively with stressful life events. This study aims to contribute to this literature in three ways. First, we assess spiritual social support that was received in religious institutions. Spiritual support is assistance that is provided with the explicit purpose of increasing the religious beliefs and behaviors of the recipient. Second, an effort was made to see if potential stress-moderating effects of spiritual support are more likely to arise among extraverts than among introverts. Third the data come from a recent nationwide survey (N = 1657). Statistical tests were performed to see if there is a three-way interaction between stress, spiritual support, and extraversion on anxiety. The findings indicate that strong spiritual support moderates the relationship between stress and anxiety, but only among highly extraverted study participants. In contrast, spiritual support tends to exacerbate the relationship between stress and anxiety among study participants with very low extraversion scores (i.e., introverts). The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

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Notes

  1. We argued earlier that extraverts are more likely to benefit from receiving spiritual support because they are more likely to seek out and receive spiritual support than extraverts. Preliminary support for this view was found in our data. The results suggest that compared to introverts, extraverts are more likely to receive spiritual support from their fellow church members (r = .396; p < .001).

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Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the John Tempelton Foundation (Grant 40,077).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, 1420 Washington Heights, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-2029, USA

    Neal Krause

  2. Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

    Kenneth I. Pargament

  3. University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

    Gail Ironson

Authors
  1. Neal Krause
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  2. Kenneth I. Pargament
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  3. Gail Ironson
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Correspondence to Neal Krause.

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Conflict of interest

Neal Krause declares that he has no conflict of interest. Kenneth I. Pargament declares that he has no conflict of interest. Gail Ironson declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any study 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.

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

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Krause, N., Pargament, K.I. & Ironson, G. Assessing the relationships among spiritual social support, stress, and anxiety: Does extraversion also play a role in the coping process?. Curr Psychol 39, 307–314 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9764-8

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