The Belief in Divine Control and the Mental Health Effects of Stressful Life Events: A Study of Education-Based Contingencies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most widely replicated findings within the mental health literature is that the experience of stressful life events (e.g., the death of a loved one, serious illness, divorce, loss of a job) are consistently associated with higher depressive symptoms. However, the magnitude of these effects varies such that some people invariably experience negative mental health consequences following the experience of significant life stressors, but many others do not. We consider why some individuals become more distressed than others following stressful life events by focusing on one particular religious belief: the sense of divine control. We examine how divine control changes in response to stress, and how this influences mental health differently across education levels. We analyze two waves of data from the Work, Stress, and Health Study (2005 and 2007) (N = 1279) using lagged dependent variable regression models. Results suggest that the moderating effect of changes in divine control associated with exposure to stressful life events are contingent on education level, depending on the stressful life event considered. In general, decreases in divine control after the experience of stress were found to be harmful for the mental health of the less educated, while increases in divine control were beneficial for the well-educated. We interpret our findings in terms of two differing perspectives on the relationship between changes in religious beliefs and mental well-being across education level after stressful life events (deprivation compensation versus enhanced resources). Taken together, this study contributes to knowledge about the social patterning (and influence) of beliefs about divine control and how changes in these beliefs may influence the mental health of individuals dealing with specific challenging circumstances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".