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The Serbian translation of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity was developed and tested among a sample of 222 students attending Niš University who self-identified as Eastern Orthodox. The data supported the internal consistency, reliability, and construct validity of this instrument, and commended it for further use in contributing to comparative empirical research within the psychology of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several measures of religious practice and religious orientation (intrinsic/extrinsic/quest) and the trait form of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory were employed in a survey of undergraduate university students from four different cultural environments: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, and the USA. The results suggest that (1) the relationship between trait anxiety and religiosity substantially varies between these samples; (2) the relationship between quest religious orientation and trait anxiety was the only one to give stable (positive) unidirectional and significant correlations across the four samples; and (3) among the religious measures employed, attendance at religious services proved to be potentially the most effective anxiety-buffering mechanism within the samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serbian Orthodoxy is studied empirically by using different measures of religiousness. After an initial placement of Serbian religiousness in the context of World Values Survey data, a sample of south Serbian university students is compared to student samples from three religions: Bosnian Muslims and Slovenian Catholics. Using World Values Survey (WVS) measures, results indicate that the Serbian Orthodox prove to be more religious than irreligious; when using our own survey data and more complex measures, the Serbian Orthodox prove to be more religious than Slovenian Catholics, but less religious than Bosnian Muslims, although Serbian Orthodox affiliates do surpass the normative means on certain items. Mysticism, religious experience, and civil religion are not outstanding, in contrast to what might have been expected from the literature. The Serbian Orthodox exhibit a high level of extrinsic psychological religiousness and guilt religiousness, both of which show a significant positive correlation with trait anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]