Personal belief in a just world and mental health

Abstract

Belief in a Just World has been shown to have positive effects on mental health and health-promoting behaviors or to be positively associated with them. However, to influence these variables, it is necessary to distinguish between Personal Belief in a Just World (PBJW) and General Belief in a Just World (GBJW) and then to investigate their explanatory mechanisms and their constituent elements. These insights would be of great practical importance.This study focuses on PBJW and aims to test the mediation hypothesis of whether the positive effects of PBJW on mental health, operationalized through the level of a Depression Score, can be mediated or explained by the variables self-efficacy and optimism.The results indicate a significant mediation effect (β = -0.382, p < .001, R² = 0.15). However, even after including the mediators in the model, a significant direct effect of PBJW on the Depression Score remains (β = -0.233, p = 0.027, R² = 0.05). This suggests the existence of other relevant explanatory variables that should be explored in future studies to make this effect usable for clinical practice. Furthermore, replication of the results with a larger sample or comparison of different subgroups should be pursued to increase generalizability.

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