Premium
Religion and spirituality
Author(s) -
Worthington Everett L.,
Hook Joshua N.,
Davis Don E.,
McDaniel Michael A.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.124
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1097-4679
pISSN - 0021-9762
DOI - 10.1002/jclp.20760
Subject(s) - spirituality , psychology , psychotherapist , value (mathematics) , clinical psychology , alternative medicine , medicine , pathology , machine learning , computer science
Many clients highly value religious and spiritual (R/S) commitments, and many psychotherapists have accommodated secular treatments to R/S perspectives. We meta‐analyzed 51 samples from 46 studies ( N = 3,290) that examined the outcomes of religious accommodative therapies and nonreligious spirituality therapies. Comparisons on psychological and spiritual outcomes were made to a control condition, an alternate treatment, or a subset of those studies that used a dismantling design (similar in theory and duration of treatment, but including religious contents). Patients in R/S psychotherapies showed greater improvement than those in alternate secular psychotherapies both on psychological ( d =.26) and on spiritual ( d = .41) outcomes. Religiously accommodated treatments outperformed dismantling‐design alternative treatments on spiritual ( d = .33) but not on psychological outcomes. Clinical examples are provided and therapeutic practices are recommended. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 67:204–214, 2011.