Vyresniojo amžiaus moksleivių religingumo ypatumai ir jų ryšys su nerimastingumu
PECULIARITIES OF THE INDIVIDUAL RELIGIOUS FAITH IN SENIOR TEENAGERS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE POSSIBLE DEGREE OF INDIVIDUAL ANXIETY

Summary/Abstract: For quite a long time, psychologists did not show interest in the issues of religion and did not find it worth studying. The research in this area was also complicated because religion was thought to have a negative effect upon the development of personality and the state of health. In two recent decades there appeared more interest in the individual religious faith but the terminology and the issues themselves have not yet been firmly established in research literature. In psychology universally accepted definitions do not exist of what religion and individual religious faith mean. There is a tendency to treat the whole complex of factors like different faiths, rituals, moral norms, and emotional aspects as constituents of religious content in psychology. All these can acquire the features of both individual and community-specific components of religion. But people that identify a certain religious faith as personally significant may not necessarily accept all the above listed components. Wulff, Fontaine, and others (1991, 1997) offer still another perspective for the study of individual religious faith in the present-day secular world. These authors view different approaches to religion within the two-dimensional framework. The space is formed around the vertical and horizontal axes, in which the vertical dimension means the individual readiness to accept the transcendental reality and the existence of God; and the horizontal axis is represented by the literal and symbolic dimensions. This way, what we receive are four representations of our attitude towards religion, which are given the following names by Wulff: literal affirmation, literal disaffirmation, reductive interpretation, and restorative interpretation. The present article is devoted to the study of individual religious faith as related to the psychic health of senior teenagers. The data of the study speak of the fact that teenagers’ religious faith has a positive impact and tends to lower their feelings of depression, hopelessness, anxiety, stress; it also enhances the positive outlook towards every-day reality. The focus of the study was on establishing the relationship between the individual religious faith and the degree of anxiety. The sample of the study involved 106 teenagers from the Catholic gymnasium in Vilnius and 105 teenagers of non-Catholic gymnasium; the age range was 16–18 years olds; there were 86 boys (40.8 per cent) and 125 girls (59.2 per cent) among the respondents. There were two different methodologies used: the Post-Critical Belief Scale for identifying the individual religious faith, and the modified Anxiety Scale by Kondash to establish the degree of anxiety. The data of the study speak of the fact that teenagers’ religious faith has a positive impact and tends to lower their feelings of depression, hopelessness, anxiety, stress; it also enhances the positive outlook towards every-day reality. The data of the study also showed that the teenagers of the

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