Peculiarities of the individual religious faith in senior teenagers and its relationship to the possible degree of individual anxiety

Straipsnyje analizuojami vyresniųjų moksleivių religingumo tipo ir nerimastingumo tyrimo rezultatai. Tikrinama hipotezė, kad egzistuoja ryšys tarp moksleivių religingumo tipo ir jų nerimastingumo laipsnioFor 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 twodimensional 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.[...]Socialinių mokslų fakultetasVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŠvietimo akademij