The Efficiency of Cultivating Islamic Spirituality in Reducing Existential Anxiety

The aim of this research is to investigate the efficiency of cultivating Islamic spirituality in reducing existential anxiety. The research project is a kind of semi-pilot survey conducted on a control group who sat a pre-test and a post-test. The population sample consists of female students at the first level of high school in Kermanshah for the academic year 1392-93(solar). They were chosen from among the students of one high school through a cluster sampling method. From among 120 students, 30 students were chosen for the survey. They were suffering from existential anxiety with a grade under the cutting line in the Scale of existential anxiety arena. They were divided into two groups: a test group (15 students) and a control group (15 students). The test group were offered 5 ninety-minute training sessions on spirituality according to an Islamic approach. After the training sessions, the two groups sat an existential anxiety arena test. A univariate co-variance analysis (ANCOVA) was used for analyzing the data. The obtained results show that there is a significant difference between the test group and the control group with regard to existential anxiety, that is, cultivating Islamic spirituality has a practical effect on reducing existential anxiety.