Patients’ ability to derive comfort from their religious faith and/or spirituality emerged as a salient mediating pathway between their God imagery at the start of treatment and positive affect at discharge, a recent study found. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative information with a religiously heterogenous sample of 241 adults who completed a spiritually-integrative inpatient program over a 2-year period, researchers tested direct/indirect associations between imagery of how God views oneself, religious comforts and strains, and affective outcomes. They found:

• When accounting for patients’ demographic and religious backgrounds, structural equation modeling results revealed: (1) overall effects for God imagery at pre-treatment on post-treatment levels of both positive and negative affect; and (2) religious comforts and strains fully mediated these links.
• Secondary analyses also revealed that patients generally experienced reductions in negative emotion in God imagery over the course of their admissions.