Role of Spiritual Intelligence in Defensive Styles of Nursing Students

Introduction: Nursing is a demanding and stressful profession and puts the healthof nurses at risk. One concept that has always been associated with the word ‘anxious is called defensive style. Sigmund Freud used this term to indicate how people usemechanisms to protect themselves from psychological trauma. This study investigatedthe role of spiritual intelligence in predicting the defensive style of nursing students.Methods: This descriptive-survey and correlation study included all nursingstudents at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences who were studying in the 2012-2013 academic year. Of these, 310 were randomly selected by cluster sampling andresponded to King Spiritual Intelligence and Defense Style Questionnaire DSQ-40.The collected data was analyzed using Pearson correlation and simple linearregression.Results: The findings indicate that a positive and significant relationship existsbetween spiritual intelligence and its components [critical existential thinking,personal meaning production, transcendental awareness, and conscious stateexpansion] with defense styles (P<0.001). Also, the relationship between spiritualintelligence and its components and neurotic and immature defense styles is negativeand significant (P<0.001). Results of the regression analysis showed that spiritualintelligence could positively and significantly predict mature defense styles and couldnegatively and significantly predict immature and neurotic defense styles.Conclusion: Based on the results, it can be concluded that students with a higherspiritual intelligence use less neurotic and immature defense styles and more maturedefense styles.

Keywords:

Intelligence , Defense Style , Nursing , Student