The Role of Spiritual Intelligence and Distress Tolerance on Coronavirus Anxiety in Students

The widespread prevalence of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused stress, anxiety, and worry in different groups, including students. Thus, this study aimed to determine the role of spiritual intelligence and distress tolerance in predicting COVID-19 anxiety in students.

This was a correlation and regression modeling (prediction) study. The statistical population of the study included all male students of Farhangian University of Shahid Bahonar Campus in Birjand City, Iran, in the academic year of 2020-2021. Accordingly, 260 individuals were selected by the convenience sampling method; they volunteered to participate in the study and virtually completed the King (2008) Spiritual Intelligence Questionnaire, Simon and Gaher (2005) Anxiety Tolerance Questionnaire, and Alipour et al.’s (2020) Corona Disease Anxiety Scale. Pearson correlation test and multiple regression analysis were employed in SPSS to analyze the collected data.

The present study results indicated an inverse and significant correlation between distress tolerance (r= -0.666), spiritual intelligence (r= -0.618), and COVID-19 anxiety (P<0.01). Additionally, the achieved results revealed that spiritual intelligence (33.6%) and anxiety tolerance (38.8%) predicted the variance of coronary anxiety.

According to the collected results, by increasing the tolerance of anxiety and spiritual intelligence and their dimensions, students’ COVID-19-induced anxiety can be reduced. Therefore, in programs based on reducing COVID-19 anxiety, more attention to distress tolerance, spiritual intelligence, and its promotion in students seems necessary.