Purpose The health and well-being of America’s youth is increasingly in jeopardy due to a ‘screen-based’ culture that decreases exposure to the natural world. We hypothesized that interactions with nature would promote physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being. To investigate this claim, we surveyed young adults at a three-week science and wilderness camp in rural West Virginia.

The Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Spiritual Well-Being (FACIT-Sp-12) is a 12-item questionnaire that measures spiritual well-being in people with cancer and other chronic illnesses. Cancer patients, psychotherapists, and religious/spiritual experts provided input on the development of the items. It was validated with a large, ethnically diverse sample. It has been successfull...

BACKGROUND Several studies are available on the lifestyle, psychological and mental health of the elderly adults. This study aimed to compare the spiritual well-being and happiness in the elderly who lived in sanitariums with those lived in the community. METHODS A comparative study was conducted on 384 elderly adults. A census sampling was used in sanitariums and a convenience sampling was p...

Fisher (1998) proposed a spiritual well-being model, comprising the domains of personal, communal, environmental and transcendental well-being, and a single global spiritual well-being dimension. This paper reports on four studies aimed at testing Fisher’s theoretical model, and establishing the validity and reliability of a new self-rating questionnaire (Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire; SWB...

Pastoral mental health is a topic that has only rarely been researched empirically in the psychological literature, yet a pastor's mental health can have a significant impact on churches, communities, and even nations (Royal and Thompson, Journal of Psychology and Christianity,31(3), 195-204, 2012). One of the thoughts prompting this research is that evangelical pastors might be expected to res...

This paper extends the reporting of contemporary use of the Spiritual Health and Life-Orientation Measure (SHALOM), which provides flexibility to researchers, enabling them to choose the version of the instrument that best suits the cohort under investigation. SHALOM was built on a solid theoretical foundation, provided by the Four Domains Model of Spiritual Health/Well-Being. It comprises 20 i...

OBJECTIVE To assess the relationship between spirituality and hopelessness, desire for hastened death, and clinical and disease-related characteristics among patients with advanced cancer, and to investigate predictors of spirituality. Spiritual well-being is thought to have a beneficial effect on patients' response to illness. DESIGN Patients were asked to complete 4 questionnaires: the Gree...

PURPOSE This article presents a model for research and practice that expands on the biopsychosocial model to include the spiritual concerns of patients. DESIGNS AND METHODS Literature review and philosophical inquiry were used. RESULTS The healing professions should serve the needs of patients as whole persons. Persons can be considered beings-in-relationship, and illness can be considered ...

Religion and psychiatry have had complicated, sometimes neutral or friendly and cooperative, sometimes competitive and antagonistic relations over their long histories. Relations between psychiatry and religion are influenced by complex belief systems, each diverse and changing. Psychiatry has often ignored spiritual and religious dimension in health and illness while religions influenced the t...

The Four Domains Model of Spiritual Health and Well-Being was used as the theoretical base for the development of several spiritual well-being questionnaires, with progressive fine-tuning leading to the Spiritual Health And Life-Orientation Measure (SHALOM). SHALOM comprises 20 items with five items reflecting the quality of relationships of each person with themselves, other people, the enviro...