Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Intrinsic Religiousness And Spirituality As Predictors Of Mental Health And Positive Psychological Functioning In Latter-Day Saint Adolescents And Young Adults, Kawika Allen, Peter W. Sanders, P. Scott Richards, Lane Fischer, David T. Morgan, Richard W. Potts

Faculty Publications

We investigated the relationships between religiousness and spirituality and various indicators of mental health and positive psychosocial functioning in three separate samples of college students. A total of 898 students at Brigham Young University participated in the three studies. The students ranged in age from 17 to 26 years old, with the average age of 20.9 across all three samples. Our results indicate that intrinsic religiousness, spiritual maturity, and self-transcendence were significantly predictive of better mental health and positive functioning, including lower levels of depression, anxiety, and obsessivecompulsiveness, and higher levels of global self-esteem, identity integration, moral selfapproval, and meaning …