M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall

• Biola University

While religious coping has been extensively linked with positive outcomes, many emic religious coping resources have been insufficiently explored from a psychological perspective. This study investigated the efficacy of a Christian meaning-making coping method, identification with Christ’s suffering, in ameliorating the negative relation between st...

Research demonstrates that people draw on their religions in coping with difficult life circumstances, and that more religious people tend to cope better than less religious people. Lament is a religious prayer practice that constitutes a form of meaning-making coping. Here, we explicate this form of coping and, in a series of three studies with Ch...

The meaning-making model proposes that distress results from discrepancies between one’s global meaning system and one’s situational appraisals of negative life events. This model suggests a preventative function for religion when religious global beliefs inform situational appraisals in ways that minimize distress. Using consensual qualitative res...

In this consensual qualitative research study, we investigated the role of refugees’ Christian faith in meaning‐making coping. High percentages of religiosity in refugee populations support the need to understand the role of religion in their coping processes. Interviews with 20 Christian refugees from 10 African and Asian countries revealed that p...

While religious meaning-making has been extensively studied, emic religious coping remains largely unexplored. This consensual qualitative research study explored Catholic cancer survivors' (N = 22) descriptions of drawing on their religious framework throughout their cancer journeys. Findings revealed distinctive Catholic resources such as the pow...

Though discussed extensively in popular culture, purity culture, a conservative Christian movement that builds on traditional sexual ethics by proscribing additional rules and regulations to govern sexual behaviors and prioritize virginity, has scarcely been examined from a psychological perspective. The present study was designed to develop and va...

The reception of God’s grace is a salient spiritual experience and is one that lies at the heart of Christianity. The present study sought to address a gap in the psychological literature pertaining to the experience of divine grace among Protestant Christians in a qualitative study with 30 adult self-identified Protestant Christians. By using Stra...

Global meaning systems help people make sense of their experiences, but suffering can violate global meaning and create distress. One type of potential violation is conflict between one’s experience of suffering and one’s deeply-held beliefs about God as loving, powerful, and just. The problem of theodicy—why an all-powerful and all-loving God woul...

Suffering is part of the human condition, and people often turn to their faith to make sense of this experience. Active religious coping has been related to positive psychological outcomes in individuals facing adversity. However, not all sources of suffering can be resolved. Spiritual surrender is one form of religious coping relevant in these unr...

Suffering is part of the human condition, and people often turn to their faith to make sense of this experience. Active religious coping has been related to positive psychological outcomes in individuals facing adversity. However, not all sources of suffering can be resolved. Spiritual surrender is one form of religious coping relevant in these unr...

The T&T Clark Hanbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil provides an extensive exploration of the theology of theodicy, asking questions such as should all instances of suffering necessarily be understood as evil? Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God allow or perpetrate evil? Is God unable or unwilling to reduce human and non-human sufferin...

Ballantyne’s call for ‘reality-orientedness’ as a core concept of intellectual humility (IH), though laudable, is too general to unify the field. Rather than pursuing an unlikely consensus, what will likely be more successful in moving the field forward will be greater clarity about how our culturally-based ideologies − discussed as ‘worldviews’ −...

In this two-part study, we developed and tested an emic, insider Christian Worldview Scale (CWS) with separate online samples of Christian adults. To begin, we conducted a literature review of key writings from both the contemporary psychology literature (e.g., general, social/personality, clinical/counseling) and Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Pr...

Previous research has demonstrated the importance of maternal attachment style to children’s well-being, but the mediators of this relationship are understudied. Parental affect is one potential mediator. Previous research has documented the relationship between parental attachment and parental affect, and between parental affect and parental behav...

Current measures of religious coping are generally etic in nature, measuring constructs across religions. Emic variables (i.e., those specific to particular religions) are often left out, which limits our ability to assess religious/spiritual coping during times of stress and adversity. Here we provide findings from three studies we conducted to de...

This study aimed to expand psychological research on hope by contributing a construct and scale to measure central dimensions of theistic eschatological hope derived from Christian scriptures. Eschatological hope was conceptualized as the anticipation that God will make all things new, raising people to everlasting life with God in joyful celebrati...

As scholars who have been engaged in interdisciplinary emic measure development, we provide our reflections on the prospects and perils of this kind of engagement. We contrast the approach we have in mind with other interdisciplinary activities; we commend engaging social scientists, philosophers, and theologians in collaboration across all of the...

Research interest in human flourishing continues to grow across multiple disciplines. In this article, we suggest means by which Christian theology can inform teaching positive psychology. We survey the field of positive psychology by characterizing and distinguishing theories regarding eudaimonic and hedonic accounts of flourishing. Christian theo...

Current measures of religious coping are generally etic in nature, measuring constructs across religions. Emic variables (i.e., those specific to particular religions) are often left out, which limits our ability to assess religious/spiritual coping during times of stress and adversity. Here we provide findings from three studies we conducted to de...

Research demonstrates that people often draw on their religions in coping with difficult life circumstances and that more religious people tend to cope better than less religious people. Lament is a form of religious coping with roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Recognizing the importance of cultural and religious resources to people’s well-b...

According to Catholic theology, God offers a gift of love, known as divine grace, to all of humanity. This gift of divine grace is the gift of redemption and forgiveness of sins from God that is offered to everyone who decides to acknowledge and accept it. Grace is central to the lived experience of many Christians. This qualitative study examined...

From a Christian theological perspective, intimacy with God is an important element of the Christian life. However, while other aspects of relationship with God have been examined in the psychology of religion, intimacy with God has not been the focus of study. In this project, we offer a conceptualization of intimacy with God as a construct, which...

We argue that advancing our understanding of religious meaning-making in the face of trauma and suffering requires greater attention to the specific meanings of suffering that religions offer, and offer an overview of eight functional Christian views of suffering. The beliefs people hold about the traumas they experience lead to differing forms of...

As scholars who have been engaged in interdisciplinary emic measure development, we provide our reflections on the prospects and perils of this kind of engagement. We contrast the approach we have in mind with other interdisciplinary activities; we commend engaging social scientists, philosophers, and theologians in collaboration across all of the...

Objectives: Research has established religion and spirituality as important resources for Black people in the US coping with adversity. Most research has been from an etic perspective, examining religious variables that are valid across multiple religions. In the present study, we asked what emic aspects of the Black church’s practices and theologi...

We argue that advancing our understanding of religious meaning-making in the face of trauma and suffering requires greater attention to the specific meanings of suffering that religions offer, and offer an overview of eight functional Christian views of suffering. The beliefs people hold about the traumas they experience lead to differing forms of...

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we d...

Previous research has demonstrated that women experience higher levels of guilt compared with men at first sexual intercourse. Research also indicates that guilt is related to religiosity and to level of relational commitment. However, there has been no research on the correlates of sexual debut in a Christian population. This study compares the ex...

Objective: Research has established religion and spirituality as important resources for Black people in the U.S. coping with adversity. Most research has been from an etic perspective, examining religious variables that are valid across multiple religions. In the present study, we asked what emic aspects of the Black church’s practices and theolog...

Recent research has demonstrated that egalitarian gender role ideologies are associated with higher marital satisfaction and higher psychological well-being. However, there has been little research investigating whether gender role ideologies in Evangelical populations follow these same trends. The current study examined how gender role ideologies...

The topic of grace has gained recent attention in positive psychology research, though little empirical work has been done to explore how religious individuals understand and experience grace. Using grounded theory, this study involves a secondary analysis of qualitative findings from seven doctoral dissertations conducted with Christians of variou...

Sanctification theory proposes that when people appraise an aspect of life as having divine character and significance, this can lead to a number of positive outcomes. While questions remain as to whether a negative aspect of life – suffering – can be sanctified, the Christian tradition supports a sanctification approach. In a series of three onlin...

Objectives: Research has established religion and spirituality as important resources for Black people in the US coping with adversity. Most research has been from an etic perspective, examining religious variables that are valid across multiple religions. In the present study, we asked what emic aspects of the Black church’s practices and theologi...

Research suggests that deeply held beliefs about the world, self, and others often inform subjective appraisals of stressful or traumatic events. The present study examined how attachment to God and spiritual self-awareness related to Christians’ appraisals of suffering. Specifically, we were interested in whether attachment to God was related to a...

The present study examined attachment to God and quest as potential moderators of the relationship between religious doubt and mental health. A sample of Christian participants ( N = 235) completed a survey which included measures of attachment to God, quest, religious doubt, and mental health. As hypothesized, attachment to God and quest significa...

The current qualitative study explored experiences of religion/spirituality and their impact on women’s identities among Christian working mothers in academia. Thirty semi-structured interviews were conducted and the data analyzed using the grounded theory method. The resultant themes reflected the roles and functions of religion/spirituality in wo...

The current study investigated the relationship between purity culture, rape myth acceptance, and intrinsic religiosity in the Christian population. Specifically, this study explored if purity culture endorsement would be associated with increased rape myth acceptance and increased likelihood of incorrectly labeling rape. It was also examined wheth...

In philosophy of religion, there are few more frequently visited topics than the problem of evil, which has attracted considerable interest since the time of Epicurus (341-270 BCE). It is well known that the problem of evil involves responding to the apparent tension between 1) belief in the existence of a good, all powerful, all knowing God and 2)...

This study focused on the glass partition, a term used to describe the challenges that exist in forming and maintaining cross-sex collegial relationships in the workplace. Women may be limited in their ability to benefit from collegial relationships due to the challenges of cross-sex relationships, particularly in a Christian environment. We use th...

Several explicitly Christian doctoral psychology programs exist in the United States, providing training in the integration of psychology and Christianity. The purpose of this study was to conduct a program evaluation of student and faculty perspectives on the Christian integration training in six explicitly Christian doctoral psychology programs....

Organizational scientists are paying increasing attention to the scientific study of humility, following a larger trend in scholarship which has emphasized the relational and interdependent nature of leadership and of business. A growing body of evidence identifies humility as vital to effective organizational leadership, facilitating positive orga...

Existing conceptualizations and operationalizations of intellectual humility (IH) have not taken into account the way IH is experienced and expressed by theists. Based on a conceptualization of Christian theistic intellectual humility, we developed a measure of the construct, following established measure development steps of developing and reviewi...

The current study sought to investigate the relationship between benevolent sexism, gender role ideologies, and well-being in Evangelical men. Despite recent research that has established a relationship between restrictive gender beliefs and negative outcomes for women, few studies have addressed the relationship between these variables in men. Fur...

The process of acquiring beliefs – including the belief that there is no God–is largely implicit. We propose that psychological factors that function largely outside of conscious awareness make different conscious reasons for nonbelief more plausible to different people. The present study focuses on intellectual humility, tolerance of ambiguity and...

Park’s meaning-making model suggests that events such as the loss of a loved one may cause distress because people’s appraised meaning of the difficult event may challenge their global orienting systems. Meaning-making alleviates distress by reducing this discrepancy. Research has shown the important role that religions often play in the meaning-ma...

This study explores how humility is contextualized in the culture of faith-based humanitarian aid leadership. Consensual Qualitative Research was used to synthesize the personal and observational experiences of 13 humanitarian aid leader exemplars. Characteristics and behaviors of humble leaders are discussed, along with the benefits of humble lead...

Mental labor is an under-researched and long-invisible component of family work. Scholars have described mental labor as important, taxing, and disproportionately performed by mothers compared to fathers. However, operational definitions used in these studies were only preliminary and lack unified terminology. Answering calls for expanded views of...

Using Park’s meaning-making model to inform our understanding of distress in suffering, we conducted a qualitative investigation of the discrepancies experienced by evangelical Christian cancer patients between their religious global meaning and their situational meaning, and the religious beliefs invoked to resolve the discrepancy. Three primary r...

The present study examined how Evangelical Christian women’s marital satisfaction is related to religiosity (i.e., religious commitment and sanctification of marriage), role ideology, and role congruence. Societal messages surrounding roles in marriage tend to conflict with conservative Christian messages, and therefore Evangelical women likely exp...

The present study examined how attachment to God and spiritual self-awareness are related to evangelical Christians’ appraisals of suffering. Specifically, we were interested in whether attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance with God were related to the appraised meaning of stressful life experiences as transformational and whether spiritual s...

This grounded theory study investigated how single, emerging adult, evangelical Christian women develop, view, experience, and manage their sexuality in the context of competing religious influences and sociocultural influences. Twenty-four undergraduate women were interviewed about the messages they received regarding their sexuality from their fa...

This study explored Evangelical Christians’ narratives regarding their cancer diagnoses ( N = 29) through grounded theory methodology. Participants drew on their religious resources to construct meaning in coping with their diagnosis. Results indicated that the predominant narrative was the redemption of suffering. Four varieties of redemption stor...

The purpose of this review paper is to present a case for more proximal and emic approaches to the study of religious meaning-making in suffering. Meaning-making is an important way in which religion and spirituality contribute to adjustment in the context of encountering difficult life events. However, much of the available research on religious m...

This interdisciplinary study details spiritual approaches including meditation and yoga shown to be helpful in improving physical and psychological well-being. Whether a person suffers from a psychological or physical malady, such as depression, addictions, chronic pain, cancer, or complications from pregnancy, the best practice treatments likely i...

This study assesses individual social attitudes and ideological beliefs regarding systems of power and sexism (i.e., Authoritarianism, Conservatism, Traditionalism, Social Dominance Orientation [SDO], Hostile Sexism [HS], and Benevolent Sexism [BS]) in relationship to Bible interpretation choice about passages related to gender. Data were collected...

This paper addresses the spiritual discouragement and religious doubt that can arise in the Christian therapist who repeatedly experiences spiritual immaturity and crisis amongst his or her Christian clients. While Christians certainly aren't perfect, they often fall so far short of that ideal that one can reasonably wonder whether the Christian fa...

We live our lives in the context of the “already but not yet,” seeking God’s Kingdom in the broken present while anticipating its fulfillment in the future. This fallen context is often occasion for suffering, which God redeems in repurposing suffering for our good. This chapter explores this redemptive repurposing in our formation. Theologically,...

Most research on religion and the body has focused on the relationship between broad dimensions of religion, such as religious commitment or religious orientation, and body image or eating behaviors. The present study extends existing research by examining two specific religiously influenced beliefs about the body within a Protestant Christian samp...

Lament is a Christian practice modeled for us by Jesus. In this article, I argue that lament is a spiritual discipline that assists the sufferer to reconstruct meaning after the disorienting effects of the suffering. Drawing on the psychological literature on stress-related growth, I show how the structure of the psalms of lament facilitates the pr...

Embodiment involves the engagement of the body with the world, including the relationship between people's bodies and their social contexts. As one aspect of a person's social context, religion has been shown to be linked to body image, weight concerns, and eating behaviours in previous research. The present study extends existing research by exami...

The American Psychological Association (APA) accredits several explicitly Christian doctoral programs in clinical psychology. To what extent do these programs offer training in religious and spiritual diversity that students may not receive at other APA-accredited programs? A total of 353 students from 5 explicitly Christian programs were surveyed...

This qualitative analysis investigated women's experiences of identity change in the process of becoming mothers. Thirty semistructured interviews were completed and the analysis was conducted through a grounded theory framework. The analytic process yielded results that grouped into three overarching themes. The first of these relates to the ways...

This phenomenological study used individual, semistructured, face-to-face interviews to explore motherhood experiences among 15 women receiving public assistance in a large urban area on the West coast. A primary phenomenon observed was that motherhood was described as an experience of identity change, with resulting emotional, behavioral, and sens...

Research on women's identity development has indicated that women generally form and view their identities within the context of their relationships and connections to others. Previous research has looked at various aspects of motherhood identity including paradoxical, conflictual, and ambivalent components of motherhood. The current study contribu...

The current study explored the motherhood strivings of 200 Christian professional mothers in the workforce and the strivings' relationship to positive affect, negative affect, satisfaction with life, interrole conflict, and the presence of psychological symptoms, in order to understand the influence of Christian subcultural factors on the experienc...

Mission statements of Christian institutions of higher education often include the purpose of forming individuals to live out their Christian commitments in larger society. This article presents the case that including theater in Christian higher education prepares students to further God's kingdom in this world after graduation—whether or not they...

In this article, we review the current status of theory and research on teaching Christian integration in psychology and counseling. Changes in student characteristics, emerging technologies, and paradigm shifts in the disciplines themselves predict unique opportunities and challenges for the future. We reflect upon directions integration learning...

This article examines the job satisfaction of women faculty at an evangelical university. Using mixed methods, the authors compared the job satisfaction of women faculty at an evangelical university with their male counterparts, as well as with men and women faculty at a secular research university in the same region. Paradoxically, they found high...

Previous research on religion and the body has tended to focus on the influence of religion in general on body image and behaviors. The present study, in contrast, examines the effects of a specific attitude toward the body, sanctification, derived from a particular religious system, and furthermore focuses on people's experiences of their body, ra...

While an emerging subset of literature has revealed that therapists with eating disorder histories often seek out positions in the field of eating disorders, there has been minimal investigation regarding what these clinicians have learned as a result of their eating disorder struggle. In this study we examine how recovery is viewed among professio...

The present study explored experiences of sexism (sexual and gender harassment) in a Christian university student population. This study assessed the frequency of sexism, documented how sexism is expressed in a Christian context, and evaluated the relationships between sexism and two outcomes, campus climate and college satisfaction. Additionally,...

The current study is a phenomenological exploration of coping with perceived racial and gender discrimination experiences among 11 Asian/Asian American female faculty at various Christian universities. Participants completed a 90-min semistructured interview. Ten of the 11 women described experiences where they perceived being treated differently d...

This study applies the construct of sanctification to working mothers' experiences of work. Women (N = 200) who had completed a master's, doctoral, or professional degree and were employed with at least one child under the age of 18 years residing in the home, completed an online survey investigating their sanctification of work, intrinsic religios...

Although character formation has always been a central goal of education, efforts to promote character education in schools have, in the last century, always been hampered by an inability to adequately define character. We offer the concept of the flourishing life as the appropriate context for defining and developing character. This concept, which...

This study examines whether adult attachment, God attachment and gender are related to perceived stress. Based on the literature on these variables, it was expected that adult and God attachment would predict perceived stress, that God attachment would have incremental validity over adult attachment in predicting perceived stress and that gender wo...

This study is a phenomenological exploration of discrimination experiences among 11 Asian/Asian-American female faculty at various Christian universities, with a specific focus on the characteristics of the Christian academic environment which contribute to those experiences. Participants completed a 90-minute semi-structured interview. Ten of the...

The present study explored gender harassment in the context of Christian higher education. Specifically, we examined ways in which the theologically based gender schemas in these settings might affect the experiences of harassment among male and female faculty. A questionnaire containing measures of harassment and two aspects of institutional clima...

Should alleviating suffering always be the primary goal in treatment? This paper proposes that suffering can best be understood in the context of the flourishing life, from the intersecting vantage points of positive psychology, philosophy of theology. We further argue that in this context, we can articulate a role for suffering. Suffering can be u...

The present study examined the relationship between gender, religious belief and ambivalent sexism. Specifically, this study tested the hypothesis that participant gender moderates the relationship between religious belief and ambivalent sexism. Three-hundred thirty seven Evangelical Christian undergraduate students from the Southwestern United Sta...

Student perspectives on the transmission of integration in integrative programs were examined through a qualitative study. Participants in the study were 595 graduate and undergraduate students (305 women and 247 men) drawn from four Evangelical Christian institutions of higher education. Participants provided written data in response to three open...

Graduate students' perspectives on integration of faith and profession were investigated using item response to identify underlying constructs. Students (N = 595) from various professions and four universities were sampled. Three factors were supported asseparate and important constructs for students. The first two factors were drawn from Sorenson'...

Graduate students' perspectives on integration of faith and profession were investigated using item response to identify underlying constructs. Students (N = 595) from various professions and four universities were sampled. Three factors were supported as separate and important constructs for students. The first two factors were drawn from Sorenson...