The Relationship Between Spiritual Intelligence and General Health in the Elderly: The Mediating Role of Mindfulness

The elderly, as one of the sensitive stages of human development, has its own unique features and conditions. Considering this issue, one of the important elements affecting the general health (GH) of the elderly appears to be their mindfulness and spiritual intelligence. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of predicting GH based on spiritual intelligence through the mediating role of mindfulness in the elderly. This was a fundamental research in terms of its purpose, and a descriptive-correlational of path analysis type in terms of its method. The statistical population of the current study included all the elderly living in nursing homes in three districts of 3, 8 and 20 of Tehran, Iran in 2022, of whom 250 people were selected as the sample using convenience sampling method. The measures consisted of King's spiritual intelligence, Goldberg and Hiller's GH and Baer et al.’s mindfulness questionnaires. The data collected by SPSS-26 and AMOS-22 software were analyzed using Pearson's correlation coefficient and path analysis. The results illustrated that the hypothesized model has a good fit with the data. Moreover, the results of the path analysis to investigate the role of the mediator variable indicated that mindfulness mediates the relationship between spiritual intelligence and GH in the elderly. As all the aforementioned three predictive variables are capable of being improved, can be used in GH related interventions in order to improve GH in the elderly.
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