The relationship between spiritual coping and generalized anxiety disorder symptoms in students

Today one of the most critical challenges facing psychopathology is the study of the characteristics that making people vulnerable to mental disorders. Generalized anxiety disorder is a severe, common, and highly disabling mental disorder in men and women that causes substantial distress and impairment in individuals and places an enormous burden on society; For example, this disorder associated with significant consequences including suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, role impairment, functional impairment, physical impairment and decrease in quality of life. Generalized anxiety disorder remains poorly understood relative to other anxiety disorders and has been more challenging to treat. This disorder is characterized by excessive anxiety and worries, difficulty in controlling of worry as well as psychological and physical complaints, including muscle tension, restlessness, fatigue, difficulty in concentration, irritability and sleep problems. So far, different behavioral, cognitive, metacognitive, and emotional models have been presented about generalized anxiety disorder. Also, several factors can be associated with a generalized anxiety disorder. Spiritual coping is another variable that can be associated with a generalized anxiety disorder. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between religious coping and widespread anxiety disorder symptoms in students. This study was a descriptive correlational study. The population in this study consisted of all undergraduate students from public universities of Tehran. The sample consisted of 700 students 18 to 28 years old from public universities of the Tehran (Shahid Beheshti University, Allameh Tabataba'i University and University of Tehran) in 2016-2017 who were selected by multistage cluster sampling. The participants completed generalized anxiety disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7; Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams & Lowe, 2006), Penn state worry questionnaire (PSWQ; Meyer, Miller, Metzger & Borkovec, 1990) and spiritual coping questionnaire (SCQ; Charzyńska, 2015). Data were analyzed by SPSS24 and Lisrel software, using Pearson correlation and structural equation modeling. The significance level was 0.05. The age average and standard deviation of participants was 21.94 (±3.17). The results of the present study showed that there is a significant relationship between positive spiritual coping and its components, namely positive person, social, environment and religion coping with generalized anxiety disorder symptoms (p<0.01). There is a significant relationship between negative spiritual coping and its components, namely negative person, social and religion coping with generalized anxiety disorder symptoms (p<0.01). Also, there is a significant relationship between positive spiritual coping and its components (except positive social) with worry (p<0.01). There is a significant relationship between negative religious coping and its components with worry (p<0.01); Positive and negative spiritual coping predicted generalized anxiety disorder symptoms (p<0.01). Also, proposed model about the relationship between spiritual copings and widespread anxiety disorder symptoms has an acceptable fit with the data. The results of this study showed that there is a significant relationship between spiritual coping and generalized anxiety disorder symptoms. The results emphasize the importance of spiritual coping inexperience of generalized anxiety disorder symptoms. Also, this finding underscores the importance of the combination of spiritual factors in the interventions or treatments of generalized anxiety disorder.