Authors: Nadia Mando, Josh Shaeffer, Jared Nielsen
Mentors: Jared Nielsen
Insitution: Brigham Young University
Background: “Feeling the Spirit” is an important experience for many active Latter-Day Saints. Feeling the Spirit is often defined by the presence of positive, even if minor, feelings which are perceived to be interactions with deity. However, some Latter-Day Saints struggle to feel the Spirit which can be distressing to them. Recently, LDS leaders have focused on understanding how depressed individuals might experience “feeling the Spirit” differently.
Objective: Our pilot study sought to understand the relationship between depression and the frequency and strength of spiritual experiences.
Methods: We used the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS21) to measure depression. We created two separate measures to inquire how frequently and strongly participants felt the Spirit in the last six months. We also created a task asking participants to read multiple scripture passages and report how strongly they felt the Spirit while reading each passage. Responses to each passage were averaged to create a state measure of feeling the Spirit. We hypothesized that higher scores of depression would predict lower scores on feeling the Spirit for all three measures.
Results: We found that scores on depression (M=11.388, SD=7.844) significantly correlated to frequency (M=3.683, SD=0.760, r= -0.352, p<.001) and strength (M=4.004,SD=0.628, r=-0.453, p<.001) of the Spirit. However, depression scores were not significantly correlated with our state measure (M=2.384, SD=0.903, r=-0.192, p=0.078). In our regression models we found that depression is a significant predictor of both frequency (R2= 0.091, F(1,83)=8.347, p=.005, =-0.029, p=.005) and strength (R2=0.158, F(1,83)=15.523, p<.001, = -0.032) of feeling the Spirit but, not of feeling the Spirit during the scripture task (R2=0.003, F(1,83)=0.236, p=0.628, = -0.463).
Conclusion: These findings suggest that depression may affect how LDS persons experience their relationship with God. Our findings take a step toward explaining why some individuals may experience difficulty in “feeling the Spirit”. Future studies are necessary to elucidate these preliminary findings.