Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: Religiosity, Emotion Regulation and Well-Being in a Jewish and Christian Sample
Allon Vishkin (),
Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom and
Maya Tamir
Additional contact information
Allon Vishkin: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Maya Tamir: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Journal of Happiness Studies, 2019, vol. 20, issue 2, No 6, 427-447
Abstract:
Abstract People who are more religious tend to experience more positive affect and higher levels of life satisfaction. Current explanations for this relation include social support, meaning in life, and more positive emotional experiences. Adding cognitive reappraisal as a new mechanism, we propose that religion consistently trains people to reappraise emotional events, making the devout more effective in applying this emotion regulation practice, which cultivates more positive affect and greater life satisfaction. In two studies, involving Israeli Jewish (N = 288) and American Christian (N = 277) participants, we found that more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal mediated the relationship between religiosity and affective experiences, which in turn, were associated with greater life satisfaction. Religiosity was associated with more frequent cognitive reappraisal (in both samples) and less frequent expressive suppression (in the Christian sample). Cognitive reappraisal mediated the link between religiosity and positive affect (in both samples) as well as negative affect (in the Christian sample). We discuss implications for understanding the link between religion and emotional well-being.
Keywords: Religion; Emotion; Emotion regulation; Life satisfaction; Well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-017-9956-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:20:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s10902-017-9956-9
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10902-017-9956-9
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave
More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().