10 Healing with Spiritual Practices benefits of prayer among Christians who sought to forgive an interpersonal offense. Participants were 411 undergraduate students at private Christian colleges. They were randomly assigned to a prayer condition, a devotional attention condition, or a no-contact control condition. People in the prayer condition engaged in a 16-day devotional reading and prayer intervention focused on forgiveness. Those in the devotional attention condition medi- tated on devotional readings not related to forgiveness. People in both prayer and devotional attention conditions forgave more, but those in the prayer intervention condition also experienced more empathy toward their offender. Greer and colleagues16 adapted for Christians a workbook version of REACH Forgiveness, which was created for secular populations.21,22 In benchmarking analyses, they compared the results of the workbook to three group interventions of nominally six hours in length. The mean d for these six-hour group studies was 0.61. For Greer and colleagues,16 the pooled d across four forgiveness measures was d = 1.37. Although no study has examined whether the spiritually formative pur- suit of forgiveness has benefits to physical and mental health, we can adduce strong evidence that increasing forgiveness would result in improvements to mental and physical health. Wade and colleagues23 did an extensive meta- analysis of randomized controlled studies of forgiveness interventions. Of forgiveness intervention trials, 10 assessed depression as an outcome and 7 assessed anxiety. The d for reducing depression was d = 0.34 and for reduc- ing anxiety was d = 0.63. These intervention studies did not assess physical stress-related variables, so any conclusions about their efficacy to treat stress-related physical disor- ders is speculative based on extrapolating from mental health variables. Waltman and colleagues24 have used Enright and Fitzgibbons’s25 process model to intervene on anger-recall stress-induced changes in myocardial perfusion and forgiveness. Patients (N = 32) were administered a baseline and anger-recall stress-imaging protocol. Of the participants, 17 who dem- onstrated anger-recall stress-induced myocardial perfusion defects were ran- domly assigned to 10 weekly interpersonal forgiveness (n = 9) or control (n = 8) therapy sessions. After treatment, they did the test again at posttest and at a 10-week follow-up. Patients who did the forgiveness intervention had fewer anger-recall stress-induced myocardial perfusion defects. Humility Humility is at the heart of spiritual formation as it is conceptualized by many belief systems. However, the psychological study of interventions to promote humility is in its infancy. Research on humility has accumulated rapidly recently however, inter- vention research is much less developed, although initial results are
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