The Role of Spirituality on The Human Condition and Healing

Abstract: This paper examines the role of spirituality in predicting positive health outcomes and human healing. Numerous studies from the last decades offer great insights into spirituality and religion's role in human emotional competencies, behavioural adjustment, and healthy recovery and healing. This study also explores how the link between spirituality and human health is mediated by influences like personality characteristics, spiritual styles, and social environment.

This paper summarises the main empirical findings on the link between spirituality and human well-being and the factors contributing to positive health outcomes. Finally, the paper will offer recommendations that guide future theory and clinical practice and can further enhance our understanding of the role of spirituality in healthy human nature and the resulting outcomes.

Keywords: spirituality, emotional competencies, behavioural adjustment, human health, personality characteristics, spiritual styles, social environment, healing, health outcomes.

The role of spirituality on the human condition and healing
There has been a substantial amount of research interest in exploring the positive contributions of spirituality on human health outcomes. Numerous studies on human health and well-being indicate that spirituality plays a vital role in human health (Nematollahi et al., 2019), life satisfaction (Zullig et al., 2006), and quality of life (Baker, 2003).

For example, findings of actively religious North Americans found that they are healthier, live longer, and are less likely than irreligious people to engage in delinquency and drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, and commit suicide (Johnson, 2010). Spirituality and religion are essential to the human experience for many individuals and communities, providing meaning, understanding, and support to everyday life trials (McMinn, 2011).

Johnson (2010) highlights that personal growth in God and one's relationship with oneself and others, being open to one’s observation of God and others, and being rightly related to spiritual truth is crucial to a meaningful understanding of the human condition. Moreover, Johnson (2010) proclaims that holiness and spirituality preserve the person's openness to the reality of human nature and health rather than distort what is true of human beings.

This paper reviews evidence on how spirituality influences health and healing, examines mediating spiritual and psychosocial factors, and concludes with key findings and recommendations for future research and clinical practice.


Major Theme
The Definition and Role of Spirituality on Health Outcomes
Before delving into the role and impact of spirituality on the human condition, it is important to define what spirituality means. Spirituality is an intrinsic phenomenon and personal experiential connectedness with a transcendent reality expressed in one’s beliefs and behaviours (Hodge, 2003). Spirituality can also be understood as a motivating influence that drives persons’ decisions, personal growth, and purpose in life and informs all other forms of their existence.

For spiritual people, spirituality is the most important and leading factor determining all aspects of their lives (Hodge, 2003). Hodge (2003) emphasizes that spirituality can be present in both theistic and non-theistic populations, regardless of whether they express their spirituality within or outside religious contexts. The key to spirituality is the outward expression of one’s intrinsic connectedness with Ultimate Transcendence, a relationship with God, or whatever one perceives as a higher divine power (Hodge, 2003).

For many decades now, various types of faith communities and disciplines, including theology, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology, to name a few, have expressed an interest in identifying the positive role of spirituality and the contributing factors to human functioning and well-being (Johnson, 2010). Professionals’ and practitioners’ interest in the impacts of spirituality highlights the intrinsic and extrinsic, individual and communal, and transcendent and secular elements of spirituality. Therefore, exploring spirituality as an integrative approach to understanding the human condition, although complex and dynamic, is valuable and beneficial to the quest for knowledge, truth, and improving the human experience.

Research has consistently shown that spiritual faith and beliefs are interrelated to human health (Nematollahi et al., 2019), well-being (Wilt et al., 2016), and quality of life (Baker, 2003). More specifically, spirituality is found to impact how people deal with life challenges positively (Yen et al., 2019) and illness (Nematollahi et al., 2019), facilitate psychological growth and healing (Piedmont, 2007), and achieve peace and successful recovery (Jibeen et al., 2018; Nematollahi et al., 2018). A study by Nematollahi et al. (2019) assessed the effects of child phenylketonuria (PKU) disease on parents' spirituality and the effect of spirituality on the life of parents with PKU children.

The authors conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 21 parents of children with PKU disease admitted at the PKU health centre in Kerman, Iran, between May 2017 and August 2018. The authors found that spiritual beliefs have an impact on parents of children with PKU disease. These parents feel closer to God, worship more, and rely more on God. This study's findings emphasize the importance of understanding the patients' and their families' spirituality for better recovery and health outcomes.

Two more studies by Piedmont (2007) and Yen et al. (2019) revealed similar results. Piedmont (2007) aimed to thoroughly examine the association between spirituality and prominent psychosocial outcomes in higher education students. The study explored the possible mediating effect of personality in self-report and observer-rated outcomes in American and Filipino samples, with 397 (274 women) and 574 (391 women) participants, respectively and an age range of 17- 62 for the American sample and 17-75 for the Filipino sample.

The results revealed a significant effect of spirituality on psychosocial outcomes, and spirituality’s predictive effect was not mediated by personality for both the American and Filipino samples. This study demonstrated spirituality’s vigorous utility as a psychological construct and its relevance to diverse psychosocial outcomes. The current study has important implications of perceived numinous reality for one’s emotional well-being and psychological growth.

Similarly, Yen et al. (2019) found a positive link between spirituality, religiosity, and resilience. The authors conducted a quantitative cross-sectional study to investigate whether spirituality, religiousness, and personality could predict stress and resilience among middle-aged (aged 40-60) Vietnamese-born American Catholics. The respondents completed online surveys answering questions about the Big Five personality dimensions, level of pathogenic stress, numinous dimensions, and features of mid-life changes and challenges.

The data analyses revealed that spirituality and religiousness incrementally predicted stress overload and resilience in midlife over gender, religious status, and personality. The authors concluded that spirituality and religiousness are important contributors to stress management and resilience maintenance for middle-aged Vietnamese-born Americans.

Archana et al.’s (2014) study of university students’ spiritual approach resonates with the literature on resilience and spirituality as predictors of psychological well-being. The authors discovered a significant and positive relationship between psychological well-being, resilience, and spirituality among students, supporting the conclusion that resilience and spiritual experience are important predictors of students’ psychological welfare.


Factors That Mediate the Relationship Between Spirituality and Overall Well-being
Evidence from recent decades’ research reflects that spiritual coping mechanisms provide a source of resilience and comfort that helps produce determination and hope for people experiencing challenging health and life stressors. Literature review shows the common mechanisms that contribute to a positive relationship between spirituality and well-being include: 1) spiritual coping elements (McMinn, 2011; Steiner et al., 2017); 2) personality traits (Jibeen et al., 2018), and 3) social support and optimism (Salsman et al., 2005; Speed et al., 2020).

Several published psychological studies have demonstrated that the use of spiritual interventions such as various forms of devotional meditation and prayer, reading spiritual material, forgiveness, and confession, among the few, to be an effective way of releasing muscle tension and stress, addressing feelings of guilt and decreasing negative feelings, such as anxiety, anger, and depression, and improving the overall response to the challenges people face (McMinn, 2011).

Steiner et al.’s (2017) study also supports that higher spirituality and spiritual well-being predict lower state and trait anxiety in adults. As spirituality and spiritual well-being increase, state and trait anxiety will likely decrease. In turn, dedication to one’s spirituality and discernment of spiritual engagement can be professed as a greater source and understanding of one’s faith. Spiritual interventions help people of all ages, socioeconomic statuses, and races develop an internalized sense of relation to the transcendent and enhance well-being and purpose in life (Malone & Dadswell, 2018).

These findings are consistent with Gall’s (2006) study on the role of spiritual coping adjustability in coping with negative life stressors among adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Gall (2006) explored the relevance of the negative and positive forms of spiritual coping to the survivors’ coping behaviour with life functioning. The participants were between 19 and 66 years old, 17.8% of whom were men. The majority reported low religious service attendance; however, 72.3% of survivors said their spirituality was very important to them, and 58.4% considered religion fairly or very important.

Survivors completed questionnaires that measured the nature of abuse descriptors, social support, general cognitive appraisal, and spiritual coping behaviour in response to current distress. The study found strong support for the contribution of positive and negative spiritual coping to the survivors’ response to present distress. This study contributed to the general body of research on coping with stress and spiritual mediation models in CSA survivors and the general population.

Another factor contributing to the link between spirituality and human health and recovery is the presence of personality traits. Jibeen et al. (2018) explored the mediating effects of personality traits like neuroticism and extraversion on the link between spiritual transcendence and positive change and spiritual transcendence and distress in vulnerable populations. The study sample consisted of 98 adult burn patients aged 25 to 50, admitted to three hospitals in Lahore, Pakistan.

The researchers discovered that neuroticism and extraversion played a moderating role in the association between spiritual transcendence and positive change and spiritual transcendence and distress in burn patients. Patients’ high levels of extraversion and low levels of neuroticism correlating with high spiritual transcendency result in healthier psychological adjustment and facilitate post-traumatic growth, which may lead to successful recovery from the burn incident. These findings have important implications for rehabilitation strategies and provide great insight into the role of spirituality in improving patient psychological and physiological well-being.

Engaging in one’s supportive social environment and optimism are key mediators for the spiritual and human health relationship (Salsman et al., 2005; Speed et al., 2020). Speed et al. (2020) conducted a study with nationally representative samples of Canadians and Americans. They investigated the spirituality-health relationship in areas of mental illness, psychological wellness, and substance abuse to determine if social support mediated the relationship. The researchers found that maximal spirituality/religiosity was associated with better health, and social support mediated the relationships of all tested outcomes, except the drug and alcohol abuse/dependence, which were not significantly impacted by social support.

The study by Salsman et al. (2005) found similar results when researching whether optimism and social support mediated the relationship between spirituality/religiousness (intrinsic and extrinsic and prayer fulfilment) and adjustment (distress and life satisfaction). The researchers found a significant association between intrinsic religiousness and life satisfaction and between prayer fulfilment and life satisfaction, mediated by optimism and social support. The significance did not change even after controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and social desirability factors (Salsman et al., 2005).


Summary and Recommendations

In light of literature from recent decades, the current study explored the role of spirituality on human health and well-being. This study also examined the mechanisms influencing the relationship between spirituality and human health. The evidence from literature review revealed that spirituality has positive outcomes on human health, peace, (Nematollahi et al., 2019) and successful recovery (Jibeen et al., 2018), and helps people achieve psychological adjustment (Salsman et al., 2005), and healing (Piedmont, 2007).

Numerous studies also found that the factors that mediated the spirituality and health relationship were spiritual styles (McMinn, 2011; Steiner et al., 2017), personality characteristics (Jibeen et al., 2018), and social support and optimism (Salsman et al., 2005; Speed et al., 2020). These factors were consistent mediators even after the researchers controlled for age, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and psychosocial adjustment.

Of course, this study has its limitations. Although the current study found strong evidence of the spirituality and health association and the mediating mechanisms for the relationship, the findings depend on the previous studies’ limitations related to the study methods, design, subjects reporting/level of understanding, findings and their interpretations. Additionally, an important consideration is how these studies defined and conceptualized spirituality because spirituality can have diverse meanings and forms of operationalization, which can lead to various results and conclusions.

However, these studies have revealed spirituality's important role in people’s health and global quality of life. Understanding the role of spirituality and potential influencing factors in the correlation between spirituality and well-being is important to formulating effective policies and practices that improve public health.

This may require more time, funding, and creating opportunities that help spiritual or non-spiritual people to identify the aspects of their lives that give them meaning, reflection, purpose, and understanding. It may also be beneficial to connect individuals and communities to appropriate spiritual spaces and resources for open and integrated discussion of issues related to their spirituality, needs, and experiences. Citing Vives, Entwistle (2015) asserts that one cannot define the soul in strict terms, but all need to understand how it (the soul) works in its psychological expressions.

Entwistle (2015) maintains that it is important to maximize opportunities for knowledge and appropriate ends and to be morally and intellectually virtuous. For this purpose, to moderate one’s passions and discern right from wrong (Entwistle, 2015), it is equally important to continue the exploratory efforts in this area to discover additional knowledge and determine the findings’ replicability, generalizability, and validation.

Continued research can contribute to meaningful evaluations, understanding, formulation and implementation of evidence-based curricula, policies, and practices that can enhance people’s well-being and quality of life.


References
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