Spiritual resources and physical health

A growing interest in the problems of human spirituality has been noted in psychology in the past few decades. This refers particularly to health psychology, where quite substantial evidence has been collected indicating a positive influence of spirituality as an individual attribute on physical health. The paper presents an attempt to conceptualize spirituality from the psychological viewpoint, as well as to develop a new questionnaire for the measurement of spirituality as human dimension. Moreover, a series of studies using the questionnaire are reported, with almost 600 participants (in that number over 400 patients with various clinical health problems). The research was focused on seeking psychological factors that might mediate the effect of spirituality on physical health. Higher levels of spirituality were fund to be associated with better adjustment to illness, higher readiness to health-promoting behaviors, and more effective coping with stress. heir valuable comments on the first version of the manuscript. (A controversy concerning spirituality as a psychological term should be noted here. Some authors, e.g. Popielski (1999) and Stras-Romanowska (1992), suggest that the debate on spirituality should be left to cultural anthropologists).