title: A Paradigm to Assess Implicit Attitudes towards God: The Positive/Negative God Associations Task.
abstract: Psychological research on the relationship between spirituality/religion and mental health has grown considerably over the past several decades and now constitutes a sizable body of scholarship. Among dimensions of S/R, positive beliefs about God have been significantly related to better mental health outcomes, and conversely negative beliefs about God are generally associated with more distress. However, prior research on this topic has relied heavily upon self-report Likert-type scales, which are vulnerable to self-report biases and measure only explicit cognitive processes. In this study, we developed and validated an implicit social cognition task, the Positive/Negative God Go/No-go Association Task (PNG-GNAT), for use in psychological research on spirituality and religion (S/R). Preliminary evidence in a large sample (N = 381) suggests that the PNG-GNAT demonstrates internal consistency, test-retest and split-half reliability, and concurrent evidence of validity. Further, our results suggest that PNG-GNAT scores represent different underlying dimensions of S/R than explicit self-report measures, and incrementally predict mental health above and beyond self-report assessment. The PNG-GNAT appears to be an effective tool for measuring implicit positive/negative beliefs about God.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Social Work, Touro College, 27 West 23rd Street, New York, NY, 10010, USA. steven.pirutinsky@gmail.com.|Center for Anxiety, New York, NY, USA. steven.pirutinsky@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pirutinsky
authors.affiliation: Center for Anxiety, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Carp
authors.affiliation: Center for Anxiety, New York, NY, USA.|Maclean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA, USA.
authors.forename: David H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Rosmarin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007585:Jews / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D007599:Judaism / Q000523:psychology*; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Anxiety disorders; GNAT; Religion; Spirituality