Beliefs About Life-After-Death, Psychiatric Symptomology and Cognitive Theories of Psychopathology‪.‬

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).