Traumaverarbeitung und Spiritualität

Most research on the effects of severe psychological stress has focused on stress-related psychopathology. Here, the author develops psychobiological models of resilience to extreme stress. An integrative model of resilience and vulnerability that encompasses the neurochemical response patterns to acute stress and the neural mechanisms mediating reward, fear conditioning and extinction, and social behavior is proposed. Eleven possible neurochemical, neuropeptide, and hormonal mediators of the psychobiological response to extreme stress were identified and related to resilience or vulnerability. The neural mechanisms of reward and motivation (hedonia, optimism, and learned helpfulness), fear responsiveness (effective behaviors despite fear), and adaptive social behavior (altruism, bonding, and teamwork) were found to be relevant to the character traits associated with resilience. The opportunity now exists to bring to bear the full power of advances in our understanding of the neurobiological basis of behavior to facilitate the discoveries needed to predict, prevent, and treat stress-related psychopathology.

A growing body of literature suggests that people often turn to religion when coping with stressful events. However, studies on the efficacy of religious coping for people dealing with stressful situations have yielded mixed results. No published studies to date have attempted to quantitatively synthesize the research on religious coping and psychological adjustment to stress. The purpose of the current study was to synthesize the research on situation-specific religious coping methods and quantitatively determine their efficacy for people dealing with stressful situations. A meta-analysis of 49 relevant studies with a total of 105 effect sizes was conducted in order to quantitatively examine the relationship between religious coping and psychological adjustment to stress. Four types of relationships were investigated: positive religious coping with positive psychological adjustment, positive religious coping with negative psychological adjustment, negative religious coping with positive psychological adjustment, and negative religious coping with negative psychological adjustment. The results of the study generally supported the hypotheses that positive and negative forms of religious coping are related to positive and negative psychological adjustment to stress, respectively. Implications of the findings and their limitations are discussed.