Exploring the relationships among humility, negative interaction in the church, and depressed affect

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study is to test three hypotheses involving humility. The first hypothesis specifies that people who are more deeply involved in religion will be more humble than individuals who are not as involved in religion. The second hypothesis predicts that humility will offset the effects of negative interaction in the church on depressed affect scores. The third hypothesis specifies that there will be a positive relationship between age and humility.

Methods: The data come from the Religion, Aging, and Health Survey, a nationwide survey of middle-aged and older Christians who attend church on a regular basis (N = 1154).

Results: The findings suggest that people who are more committed to their faith tend to be more humble. The results also reveal that negative interaction in the church is greater for people with lower humility scores than individuals with higher humility scores. In contrast, the data indicate that older adults are not more humble than middle-aged people.

Conclusions: The findings are noteworthy because they identify a source of resilience that may help middle-aged and older adults cope more effectively with the effects of stress.

Keywords:

• humility
• negative interaction
• depressed affect

Notes

1. Measures of humility, negative interaction in the church, and depressed affect were also available in the Wave 3 and Wave 4 data. There are two reasons why a set of longitudinal analyses were not conducted in the current study. First, levels of exposure to negative interaction at Wave 3 were low (M = 5.74), suggesting that most study participants experienced little to no negative interaction. This may have been due to the advanced age of study participants at Wave 2 (M = 78.16). Second, the advanced age of the study subjects also suggests that they may have been hardy survivors. Third, even after imputation with the EM procedure, only 489 cases were available for analysis. A power analysis suggested that the power to detect the effect size shown in Table 3 at the .05 level was only 52%, which is far below the recommended power of .80.

2. As Enders (2010) points out, the EM procedure may produce biased estimates of standard errors which may, in turn, unduly affect tests of statistical significance. In order to assess the extent of this problem in the current study, the analyses were repeated after using listwise deletion procedures to deal with item non-response. The findings were virtually identical to the results that are reported in this study. For example, the interaction between humility and church-based negative interaction on depressed affect scores was significant at the .004 level with listwise deletion, while the results presented below reveal that this interaction was significant at the .001 level when the EM procedure was used. Using multiple imputation to deal with item non-response is yet another option but it was not used here because this procedure does not provide standardized regression coefficients, thereby limiting the extent to which the strength of relationships can be evaluated.

3. The finding that religious commitment, but not church attendance, is associated with humility may be construed as showing that a sense of humility is not socially based. Additional analyses (not shown in Table 2) were conducted to see if spiritual support is associated with humility. Spiritual support is defined as informal assistance that is provided with the explicit purpose of bolstering and maintaining the faith of the recipient (see Krause, 2008). The findings reveal that the correlation between spiritual support and humility is: r = .373; p < .001.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Institute on Aging [RO1 AG014749].