The Relationship Between Religious Orientation and Psychological Distress Symptoms

The aim of this study is to determine the relationships between religious orientations and symptoms of psychological distress. The study was carried out with 341 adult female and 236 adult male participants residing in the TRNC. Personal Information Form, Religious Orientation Scale (ROS, Allport and Ross, 1967) and Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90, Derogatis, et al., 1973) were used to collect research data. The Independent sample t-test was used to compare SCL-90 scores according to the participants' intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation. There is a statistically significant difference between the scores of the participants with low and high intrinsic orientation in the SCL-90 and in the sub-dimensions of Interpersonal Sensitivity, Anxiety, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation and Psychoticism. Interpersonal Sensitivity, Anxiety, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation and Psychoticism and general scores of the participants whose intrinsic orientation scores were in the last 27% (higher) were found to be significantly higher than those in the first 27% (lower). Independent sample t-test results comparing SCL-90 scores according to participants' extrinsic orientation showed that there were statistically significant differences between the scores of participants with low and high extrinsic orientation on the SCL-90 and the Interpersonal Sensitivity, Phobic Anxiety, ParanoidIdeation and Psychoticism subscales. The Interpersonal Sensitivity, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation and Psychoticism and General symptom scores of the participants whose extrinsic orientation scores were in the last 27% (high) were found to be significantly higher than the participants whose extrinsic orientation scores were in the first 27% (low). The findings were discussed in the light of the literature.