Investigating the Role of Patience, Cognitive Flexibility, and Wisdom in Predicting the Spiritual Health of Students

Spiritual health has been recognized as one of the most important dimensions of human health and of course complementary to other dimensions. Although research has been performed in the field of spiritual health consequences, few researchers have investigated the antecedents of this construct. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of patience, cognitive flexibility, and wisdom in predicting the spiritual health of students. For this purpose, 200 undergraduate and graduate students of Arak University in 2022-2023 were selected by cluster sampling method and responded to comprehensive spiritual health (Amiri et al., 2014), patience (Khormaei, Farmani, and Soltani, 2013), cognitive flexibility(Dennis and Vandwal, 2010) and wisdom (Schmidt, Maldon, and Ponders, 2012) questionnaires. The data were analyzed by Enter and Step-by-Step regression model using SPSS 26 software. The linear combination of predictor variables including patience, cognitive flexibility and wisdom with spiritual health is significant and about 61% of the variance of spiritual health is explained by these variables (P˂0.01). In the step-by-step regression analysis, the two variables of patience and cognitive flexibility had a significant role in predicting spiritual health (P˂0.01), but the contribution of wisdom in this prediction was not significant.  It can be stated that considering the significant and prominent role of patience as an Islamic moral and psychological virtue as well as psychological flexibility in predicting spiritual health, it could be benefit from teaching these two concepts in strengthening spiritual health.