Religious Coping as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Stress and Depressive Symptoms

This study examined whether religious coping (positive and negative) prospectively moderated the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms in young adults. Religious commitment was examined as a potential moderator of the effect of religious coping on the stress-depression relationship. Participants were 320 undergraduates from a small, private Christian university who reported weekly fluctuations in stress and depressive symptoms across an 8-week diary study. Data were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Results indicated that negative religious coping moderated the relationship between stress and depression, but only for those who reported high levels of religious commitment. We found no evidence for positive religious coping as a buffer against the effects of stress on depressive symptoms. Depressive symptoms and diagnoses increase markedly during adolescence and early adulthood, with 11.7% of Americans expe- riencing a major depressive episode by age 22 (Shanahan, Cope- land, Costello, & Angold, 2011). Although exposure to stress predicts onset and course of depression (Kendler, Karkowski, & Prescott, 1999), contemporary cognitive-behavioral theories of depression hold that individual differences in the experience of and response to stress increase the risk of experiencing depressive symptoms (Abela, Aydin, & Auerbach, 2006; Hankin, Abramson, Miller, & Haeffel, 2004; Hyde, Mezulis, & Abramson, 2008). According to these theories, many factors that influence the de- velopment of depression do so by moderating the stress- depression relationship, either by buffering or exacerbating the effects of stress. One factor that may influence the relationship between stress and depression is religiosity. There has been a recent increase in research on the impact of religiosity on mental health (Ano & Vasconcelles, 2005; Carpenter, Laney, & Mezulis, 2012; Davis, Ashby, McElroy, & Hook, 2014; Hall & Flanagan, 2013; Rasic, Kisely, & Langille, 2011; Sternthal, Williams, Musick, & Buck, 2010; Taylor, Chatters, & Abelson, 2012) with an emerging atten- tion on religious coping strategies. Religious coping strategies refer to spiritual and religiously based cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal responses to stressors (Pargament, Smith, Koenig, & Perez, 1998). Research indicates there are both positive and neg- ative religious coping strategies that differentially impact an indi- vidual's mental health (Pargament, Feuille, & Burdzy, 2011; Par- gament et al., 1998; Ramirez et al., 2012). Although religious coping has been consistently linked with mental health, few studies have examined religious coping as a moderator of the relationship between stress and depression in a prospective study (Carpenter et al., 2012; Pirutinsky, Rosmarin, Pargament, & Midlarsky, 2011). Additionally, there is evidence that the benefits of religious coping in response to stress may differ for those with higher levels of religious commitment relative to those with lower levels of reli- gious commitment (Eliassen, Taylor, & Lloyd, 2005). The current study examines positive and negative religious coping as moder- ators of the effects of stress on depressive symptoms in an 8-week prospective study among young adults. Furthermore, we assess religious commitment as a moderator of the effect of religious coping on the stress-depression relationship.