Early adulthood, between 18 and 25, is viewed as a decisive period of life for the prevention and treatment of anxiety and depression. Although the topic of their mutual relationship is well-known, little has been uncovered about the mechanism underlying this connection. To understand the indirect pathways between anxiety and depression, we chose the sense of meaning of life as a mediator because people’s beliefs that their lives are or can be purposeful may protect against depression. The sample was composed of 277 Polish young adults. A small majority of the participants were women (58.8%). The mean age was M = 22.11 (SD = 1.72). We used in the research the Direct Behavior Rating-Scale Items Scale, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, and the Brief Screen for Depression. Correlational analysis showed that, consistent with past findings, anxiety correlated positively with depression and searching for meaning. It was also negatively associated with presence of meaning. Moreover, depression was negatively linked to presence of meaning and positively with searching for meaning. Regression-based mediation analyses (PROCESS macro 3.4) proved that the relationship between anxiety and depression was mediated by presence of meaning in life, suggesting that having a sense of meaning may be a pathway by which feelings of tension relative to adverse events protect against depression.

Job burnout is considered an outcome of prolonged exposure of employees to stress. Although many studies have focused on the presence of a direct association between stress and burnout, we still know very little about mediators that indirectly play a role in this relationship. Previous analyses have determined that self-efficacy acts as a mechanism that explains the overall relationship between stress and burnout. However, there is no such evidence to support the mediatory function of hope. Therefore, the main aim of the current study was to verify whether self-efficacy, hope pathways, and hope agency are mediators in this relationship. The study included 408 Polish-speaking adults who completed the Perceived Stress Scale, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Dispositional Hope Scale. The outcomes indicated a positive correlation of stress with the overall burnout score, as well as all subscales. Moreover, hope agency was a mediator, thus suggesting that there is also an indirect relationship between stress and job burnout. Therefore, it can be assumed that higher stress is associated with lower motivation to generate and sustain the actions needed to reach the goals. Consequently, lower hope agency may lead stressed employees to greater exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment.

Research indicates that both cognitive appraisal and personal resources can noticeably influence health behaviors, as individuals modify their health convictions and practices on the basis of threat appraisal, personality, and meaning. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether coping strategies and meaning-making can serially mediate the relationship of threat appraisal and resilience with health behaviors in recovered COVID-19 patients. Self-report measures of threat appraisal, resilience, coping, meaning-making, and health behaviors were completed by 266 participants (aged 17 to 78, 51.5% female) who had recovered from COVID-19. The serial mediation analysis showed that the relationship of threat appraisal and resilience with health behaviors was mediated by problem-focused coping, meaning-focused coping, and meaning-making, but not by emotion-focused coping. These results suggest that associations among threat perception, resilience, and health behavior depend to some extent on the interplay of coping and meaning-making, which reveals their unique role in the process of recovery from COVID-19, with potential implications for health interventions.

Religious and spiritual (R/S) struggles are defined as the occurrence of tension, conflict, or strain that focus on matters of ultimate significance perceived by people as sacred. The widespread prevalence of R/S struggles and the growing demand for research in this area created the need for a brief tool. Recently, the 14-item form of the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale was developed and validated (Exline et al. in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2022a). Given the significance of the empirical research on R/S struggles, we implemented the project of structure verification, internal consistency confirmation, reliability, and nomological validation of the Polish variant of the RSS-14 through three separate studies. With respect to the internal structure of the RSS-14, the CFA from three studies confirmed the good fit of the six-factor model, very similar to the one obtained in the original version of the tool. Moreover, both the total score and the subscales had high reliability and acceptable stability over the three studies. With respect to the nomological analyses, R/S struggles were related negatively to life satisfaction, presence of meaning in life, self-esteem, social desirability, religious centrality, and positively with search for meaning, God’s disengagement, poorer health indicators, sleep problems, stress, and cognitive schemas (this category was the new element of our research). Polish 14-item version of the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale seems a valuable tool to assess religious strains.

In comforting or distressing circumstances, individuals tend to have various perceptions of themselves. It seems that religious comfort and religious distress correlate differently with people’s self-esteem. Since the relationship between religiosity and self-esteem is not only direct but can be mediated by other factors that are recognized as buffers against adverse situations, our main goal was to verify whether dispositional gratitude may have an indirect effect on the association between both variables. The research involved data from 254 participants aged 18 to 25 (M = 21.24; SD = 2.09) and included 192 women (76%) and 62 men (24%). To measure the title variables, we used: the Religious Comfort and Strain Scale (RCSS), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), and the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6). The results showed that people who consider religion as a source of comfort express positive attitudes toward the self and recognize others’ kindness, as well. In contrast, people who consider religiosity as a cause of fear, stress, and internal strain tend to display a lower subjective sense of personal worth and lower appreciation of the positivity around them. Moreover, gratitude had a mediatory effect on the relationships between religious comfort/negative emotions toward God and self-esteem.

Postponed parenthood is considered one of the most extensive changes in the process of family formation. Among the many reasons for deferred parenthood, those related to greater feelings of incompetence as a potential parent, self-focus, perceiving parenthood as a burden, fearing the changes that the birth of a child may bring to a person’s life, financial insecurity, and worrying about the child’s future seem particularly important. Since little is known about the motives for delayed parenthood in relation to anxiety and psychological maturity, the main goal of our study was to verify how these variables may be related to each other and whether maturity for parenthood mediates the direct association between anxiety and the motives for delayed parenthood. The sample consisted of 223 Polish adults (the age range of the participants was 18–44 years). The respondents completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), the Maturity to Parenthood Scale (MPS), and the Multidimensional Scale of Motives for Postponing Parenthood (MSMPP-18). The results showed positive correlations between anxiety and four (uncertainty, burden, change, and finance) of the six motives for postponing parenthood and postponed parenthood overall. Maturity for parenting and all its dimensions correlated negatively with anxiety and all factors of postponed parenthood, except worry about the child’s future. In all six of the seven models (except “worry”), at least one of the factors of maturity to parenthood mediated the relationship between trait anxiety and motives for postponing parenthood/total score. Based on the results it can be assumed that a tendency to direct attention to a threat related to the context of child-bearing and child-rearing may lead to lower maturity to parenthood, which in turn may result in various motives for postponing parenthood.