The Effect of Spiritual Intelligence Training on the Indicators of Mental Health in Iranian Students: An Experimental Study

Mental health of students is one of the important issues in psychology, psychiatry and sociology and that is viewed as one of the main responsibilities of teachers and trainers. Recently the structure of spiritual intelligence as a component of mental health is a concept that emanates in light of interest in the field of psychology of religion and spirituality. This experimental study aimed to determine the effect of spiritual intelligence training on the indicators of mental health situation of Iranian students. To get sampling, we used a Multi-Stage Cluster method and high school students were randomly assigned to the two groups of control (n = 30) and experiment (n = 28). Experimental group was involved in seven weekly sessions of intervention by spiritual intelligence training and the control group received no intervention. The pre-test and post-test data were collected by the SCL-90-R scale. Results in the pre-test and post-test showed that spiritual intelligence as a key intervention decreased interpersonal sensitivity, somatization, obsessive-compulsive, depression, anxiety, aggression, phobic, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism in experimental group in compared with the control group. These experimental findings supported this notion that spiritual intelligence training as a new psychological and religious construction is able to decrease psychological disasters and to improve the experienced level of mental health among high school students.