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Article Excerpt
The present study examined the association between mental health and pleasant and unpleasant beliefs about life-after-death, using data from a national web-based survey of U.S. adults. Regression analyses were conducted on five pleasant and two unpleasant after-life beliefs using six classes of psychiatric symptoms as dependent variables: anxiety, depression, obsession-compulsion, paranoid ideation, social anxiety and somatization. As hypothesized, pleasant afterlife beliefs were associated with better, and unpleasant beliefs were associated with poorer mental health, controlling for age, gender, education, race, income and marital status, social support, prayer and church attendance. The results are discussed in the context of cognitive theories of psychopathology and psychotherapy that propose that many psychiatric symptoms are caused and moderated by beliefs about the dangerousness of, or threat of harm posed by, various situations. Suggestions are made for future research that differentiates between psychiatric symptoms that may be influenced to varying degrees by cognitive input, and therefore beliefs.
A 1991 review of the literature on religion and mental health revealed a degree of ambiguity about the association between them, some of which appeared to be attributable to methodological differences in measuring religion (Gartner, Larson, & Allen, 1991). Despite this ambiguity, one clear finding that emerged from methodologically sound studies was a strong positive relationship between religious participation and mental health. Over the years, attendance at religious services--often called "church attendance"--has been one of the most widely used measures of religion in research on religion and physical and mental health, and numerous studies consistently have found that church attendance is positively related to both (Larson & Larson, 2003).
A meta-analysis of recent studies on religion and mental health that were published between 1990 and 2001 provides some very interesting findings (Hackney & Sanders, 2003). In light of the reviews by Larson and his colleagues, the most interesting one may be that measures of institutional religion, such as "church attendance" show the weakest association with psychological adjustment compared to other measures of religion. Hackney and Sanders (2003) classified the independent variables in 35 studies into three categories: institutional religion, which mainly included participation in public religious services and rituals; ideological religion, which encompassed attitudes and values and the salience of religious beliefs; and personal devotion, which included attachment to God, intrinsic religious orientation, and personal prayer and devotion. Their analysis suggests that institutional religion exerts the least influence on psychological well-being, whereas personal devotion exerts the most influence on well-being, with ideological religion falling somewhere in between.
Hackney and Sanders' (2003) results indicate that the salubrious effects of personal religious conviction and beliefs are greater than the typical association found between well-being and participation in public-religious activities. This is a particularly important finding since research on religion and health has tended to ignore religious beliefs (George, Ellison, & Larson, 2002; George, Larson, Koenig, & McCul-lough, 2000). Indeed, we were able to identify only four studies in Hackney and Sanders' sample that measured specific religious beliefs (Dorahy et al., 1998; Poloma & Pendleton, 1990; Rasmussen & Charman, 1993; Schafer, 1997). All four studies measured beliefs about God and three of the four also asked people if they believed in life-after-death--specifically, heaven and hell (Poloma &C Pendleton, 1990; Rasmussen & Charman, 1993; Schafer, 1997). Two other studies in their sample measured participants' strength of religious beliefs, in general, but did not ask about specific beliefs (Blaine & Crocker, 1995; Pressman, Lyons, Larson, & Strain, 1990). Schafer's 1997 study, which was the only one to compare the effects of belief in God and belief in life-after-death, found a significant positive association between psychological well-being and belief in God, but no association between well-being and belief in life-after-death or belief in heaven and hell.
Though Schafer's (1997) study found no relationship between belief in life-after-death and psychological well-being, a recent study by Flannelly, Koenig, Ellison, Galek and Krause (2006) found a significant salubrious association between belief in life-after-death and psychiatric symptoms. Other research also suggests there is a salubrious association between belief in life-after-death and physical and psychological well-being (Ellison, Boardman, Williams, & Jackson, 2001; Krause et al., 2002), but aside from Schafer (1997), none of these have examined the association between specific afterlife beliefs and mental health.
Flannelly et al. (2006) reported that belief in life-after-death was associated with lower levels of sympto-mology in six psychiatric conditions. The present study tested the association between specific afterlife beliefs and the same six clusters of psychiatric symptoms examined in the Flannelly et al. study. We hypothesized that pleasant beliefs or images about the afterlife would be associated with lower levels of symptomology whereas unpleasant beliefs about the afterlife would be associated with higher levels of symptomology. We discuss theories that link psychiatric disorders to brain mechanisms that assess the dangerousness of the world, and we suggest that religious beliefs can directly affect these brain mechanisms.
Beliefs about Life-After-Death
Belief in an afterlife is widely accepted in the United States. National surveys conducted between 1970 and 1999 have found high levels of belief in life-after-death, with three-quarters of all Americans saying they believe in an afterlife (Greeley & Hout, 1999; Harley & Firebaugh, 1993; Klenow & Bolin, 1989-1990). By taking a closer look at specific beliefs than other studies had done, Greeley and Hout (1999) provide limited but valuable information about the prevalence of various beliefs about life-after-death. They reported that "Nearly all Christians think that union with God, peace and tranquility, and reunion with relatives are very likely or likely to await them in the afterlife" (p. 833). In contrast, very few people endorsed the belief that life-after-death would be "a paradise of pleasures and delights" or "a pale shadowy form of life, hardly life at all." Overall, they found that "Jews rank most of the images the same way Christians do" (p. 833).
How did these and other beliefs about life-after-death arise? In ancient history, afterlife beliefs were most prominent in the Egyptian civilization, but peoples in surrounding areas held various views about life-after-death (Segal, 2004).
Jewish Afterlife Beliefs. The Hebrew Bible says very little about the fate of individuals when they die (Lamm, 1988; Raphael, 1996; Segal, 2004), but the Israelites shared the Babylonian belief that the dead went to dwell in an underground "land of no return," where they lead a shadowy kind of existence. The Bible calls this place Sheol, and refers to it as "the pit," and "the land of darkness," among other things (Raphael, 1996; Sonsino & Syme, 1990). The concept of resurrections first appears in the writings of Ezekiel in the 6th century, B.C.E. (Raphael, 1996; Sonsino & Syme, 1990). By the 2nd century B.C.E., the widely held view of resurrection in...
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