The dataset, compiled by Csaba Szilagyi of Rush University and Johns Hopkins Medicine and Patricia K. Palmer of Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, captures survey responses from 274 Clinical Pastoral Education students at baseline, along with pre- and post-training longitudinal data from 196 of those students. The participants were interns and residents enrolled at 29 centers accredited by ACPE, the standard-setting body for pastoral education formerly known as the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. Data collection took place between 2020 and 2022, a period that spanned the COVID-19 pandemic and placed unprecedented emotional strain on healthcare environments of every kind.

What makes the resource scientifically valuable is its dual focus on two constructs that researchers consider core professional competencies for chaplains. The first is emotional intelligence, the capacity to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions in oneself and others. The second is counseling self-efficacy, a trainee’s belief in their own ability to carry out the concrete activities of counseling, from building rapport to managing difficult conversations. Both constructs have been studied extensively in nurses, physicians, psychologists, and social workers, but comparable large-scale evidence in chaplaincy has been conspicuously absent, leaving educators without a solid empirical foundation for judging whether their experiential training model actually works.

To measure emotional intelligence, the researchers used the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, a widely deployed self-report instrument that assesses traits such as emotion perception, emotion regulation, and the utilization of feelings in problem solving. Counseling self-efficacy was measured with the Counselor Activity Self-Efficacy Scales, which break the counseling role into specific task domains and ask respondents to rate their confidence in each. By pairing these two validated instruments across multiple time points, the dataset allows researchers to examine not just snapshots of ability but trajectories of change over the course of training, the kind of longitudinal design that single-site studies of chaplaincy education have rarely achieved.

The longitudinal structure is particularly rich for residents, the more advanced tier of CPE trainees. For this group the dataset includes not only pre-training and post-training assessments but also a mid-residency measurement, creating a three-point trajectory that can reveal whether gains in emotional intelligence and self-efficacy accumulate steadily, plateau, or accelerate at particular stages of supervised clinical practice. Alongside the quantitative scores, the dataset records demographic and educational information for each participant, enabling analyses of how factors such as age, gender, prior education, and religious background relate to baseline competencies and to the amount of growth trainees experience.

Perhaps the most distinctive component is qualitative. The dataset preserves open-ended responses in which students described what they perceived as facilitators and barriers to the development of their emotional intelligence during training. These free-text accounts offer a ground-level view of how experiential education actually operates: which supervisory practices, clinical encounters, and peer group processes trainees credit with sharpening their emotional awareness, and which structural obstacles, from heavy patient loads to limited feedback, they identify as impediments. Combined with the validated scale scores, this mixed structure supports both statistical modeling and thematic analysis within a single coherent resource.

The parent study behind the dataset was designed to answer three questions that have lingered in the pastoral psychology literature: whether emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy change from the start to the end of CPE, what the baseline distributions of these capacities look like across a broad, geographically dispersed sample, and how demographic and educational factors shape both. Because the data were gathered across 29 accredited centers rather than a single institution, the sample captures the heterogeneity of real-world CPE programs, which vary in size, setting, patient population, and educational philosophy. That breadth matters enormously for anyone hoping to generalize findings to the profession as a whole, and the authors note that, to date, this stands among the largest multicenter datasets in CPE research.

The potential applications extend well beyond chaplaincy itself. Researchers studying emotional intelligence and self-efficacy development in comparable healthcare professions, including nursing, medicine, social work, and clinical psychology, can use the dataset as a comparison benchmark for other trainee populations. Educational scientists interested in experiential learning more broadly may find in it a rare opportunity to model competency growth in a profession where learning happens primarily through supervised encounter with real patients rather than through classroom instruction. And because the data are being shared openly, the resource lowers the barrier to entry for smaller research teams who lack the infrastructure to mount their own multisite data collection efforts.

The project also offers a case study in responsible research conduct. The study was reviewed by the Johns Hopkins Medicine Institutional Review Board, which determined that formal ethical approval was waived because the research qualified for exemption under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Common Rule, with survey data recorded without identifiable personal information and posing no more than minimal risk. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and the work was funded by the Foundation for ACPE. The authors acknowledge collaboration with Paul Galchutt, Dr. Kristin Langstraat, and Dr. George Fitchett, along with the ACPE Certified Educators who supported data collection and the students who took part.

For a field that has long relied on small, single-site studies and anecdotal accounts of transformation, the arrival of a large, validated, longitudinal, multicenter dataset marks a genuine inflection point. It gives chaplaincy educators, for the first time, the statistical power to ask whether the experiential model at the heart of their profession demonstrably builds the emotional competencies it promises, and it gives the broader psychological sciences a new window into how human beings learn to do some of the most emotionally demanding work in healthcare. As hospitals increasingly recognize spiritual care as an integral component of patient-centered medicine, evidence about how that care workforce is trained has never mattered more.

Subject of Research: A multicenter longitudinal dataset measuring emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy in clinical pastoral education students at U.S. healthcare training centers.

Article Title: Multicenter dataset describing emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy among clinical pastoral education students in healthcare settings

Article References: Szilagyi, C., & Palmer, P. K. (2026). Multicenter dataset describing emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy among clinical pastoral education students in healthcare settings. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00905-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00905-2

Keywords: emotional intelligence, counseling self-efficacy, clinical pastoral education, healthcare chaplaincy, ACPE, Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, Counselor Activity Self-Efficacy Scales, longitudinal dataset, pastoral psychology, experiential education, trainee competency, open data

The article, written by Edgar Cazares Diaz, a chaplain in the Department of Spiritual Care at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego who is also affiliated with the School of Behavioral Sciences at California Southern University, draws on his clinical experience in behavioral health units, palliative care and hospice settings, and acute hospital practice. His proposal, called the WATCH framework, is designed to help pastoral caregivers relate to distressing thoughts without panic, moralism, or what he calls therapeutic overreach. The paper appears at a moment of growing interest in the intersection of spirituality and mental health, and it represents an unusually concrete attempt to translate ancient ascetic theology into a working method for modern spiritual care.

At the conceptual heart of the paper is a dialogue across some sixteen centuries. Diaz reaches back to Evagrius Ponticus, the fourth-century desert monk whose taxonomy of the logismoi—habitual patterns of thought, particularly harmful or misleading ones—laid the groundwork for much of Western thinking about temptation, attention, and the inner life. Alongside the logismoi, Evagrius developed the ideal of nepsis, a Greek term meaning mental and spiritual alertness, clear-headedness, and self-control: the disciplined capacity to watch one’s own thoughts arise without immediately being captured by them. In Evagrius’s account, a thought is not yet a sin; the danger lies in consenting to it, entertaining it, and letting it harden into action or identity. That distinction, Diaz argues, is pastorally potent: it separates the arrival of an unwanted thought from the moral drama that the care-seeker attaches to it.

The ancient framework is placed, deliberately and with stated limits, in conversation with modern metacognitive theory. Metacognition—the ability to monitor and evaluate one’s own thinking—became a formal object of psychological study with John Flavell’s foundational 1979 work, and it matured into a clinical approach through Adrian Wells and Gerald Matthews’s S-REF model of emotional disorder and Wells’s subsequent metacognitive therapy. In that tradition, psychological distress is sustained not simply by negative thoughts but by a person’s beliefs about their own thoughts—beliefs that intrusive thoughts are meaningful, dangerous, or must be controlled. A 2018 systematic review and meta-analysis by Normann and Morina found metacognitive therapy to be efficacious across anxiety and depression, giving the approach solid empirical footing. Diaz’s insight is that Evagrius was, in functional terms, a theorist of metacognition long before the term existed: nepsis is essentially the practiced skill of observing thoughts as thoughts.

The paper also engages the clinical literature on scrupulosity, the obsessive-compulsive presentation in which religious and moral fears drive compulsive rituals and rumination. Cognitive-behavioral analyses by Abramowitz and Jacoby, and treatment studies by Huppert and Siev, describe how individuals with scrupulosity misinterpret intrusive thoughts as morally significant, a phenomenon the literature calls thought-action fusion—originally documented by Shafran, Thordarson, and Rachman in 1996. In thought-action fusion, merely having a thought is experienced as equivalent to performing the act, or as making the dreaded event more likely. For religious care-seekers, the fusion carries an additional load: the thought is read as evidence about the soul. Diaz’s argument is that pastoral caregivers who do not understand this mechanism may inadvertently reinforce it, treating a distressing image as a confession of intent or a spiritual crisis demanding exorcistic urgency, when what the person needs first is a calm reframing of what a thought is.

To make the framework concrete, the paper presents two composite pastoral examples, drawn from the author’s practice settings. The first comes from a behavioral health unit, where a care-seeker is tormented by unwanted, intrusively blasphemous or violent thoughts and interprets them as proof of demonic attack or lost salvation. The second comes from palliative care, where a dying patient’s rumination—repetitive regrets, self-condemning interpretations of a life, anxious images—threatens to consume the remaining time. In both vignettes, the caregiver’s task is not to adjudicate the content of the thoughts, nor to deliver a verdict on their spiritual meaning, but to change the care-seeker’s relationship to thinking itself. The distinction matters clinically as well as pastorally: research on religion, spirituality, and mental health, including the extensive work of Harold Koenig and colleagues, shows that religious framing can either buffer distress or amplify it, depending on how spiritual struggles are interpreted and supported.

The WATCH framework gives caregivers a five-step sequence. W stands for Welcome without alarm: the caregiver receives the disclosure of the distressing thought calmly, because a startled or horrified reaction teaches the care-seeker that the thought is indeed catastrophic. A is Attend to the thought as a thought: gently helping the person see the mental event as an event in consciousness, not a fact about the world or the soul. T is Trace what the thought is doing: investigating its function—whether it is driving rumination, avoidance, compulsive reassurance-seeking, or shame—and what beliefs about thinking are sustaining it. C is Choose an appropriate pastoral response: selecting among practices such as reframing, a tradition in pastoral care associated with Donald Capps, contemplative attention, confession understood non-punitively, or simply normalized companionship. H is Help further when needed: recognizing when the distress crosses the threshold where referral to mental health professionals is warranted, and making that referral a bridge rather than a rejection.

Diaz is careful about the boundaries of the model. The paper is a pastoral-theological framework, not a psychotherapy manual, and he explicitly limits the conversation between Evagrian asceticism and metacognitive theory rather than claiming equivalence between them. Nepsis, in the monastic literature, is embedded in a whole theology of prayer and the passions—scholars such as Columba Stewart have shown how Evagrius’s imageless prayer and his account of the logismoi form an integrated spiritual vision—while metacognitive therapy is an empirically tested clinical intervention. The framework borrows the structural insight both traditions share, that second-order beliefs about thoughts are the fulcrum of change, without collapsing their different vocabularies and goals. This kind of disciplined integration reflects a broader movement in spiritually integrated care, represented by figures such as Kenneth Pargament in the psychology of religion and coping, David Rosmarin in spiritually adapted cognitive-behavioral therapy, and Carrie Doehring in postmodern pastoral practice.

The practical stakes are considerable. Professional chaplains work under published standards of practice, such as those of the Association of Professional Chaplains, and are increasingly embedded in healthcare teams where spiritual care is recognized as a dimension of whole-person medicine—the 2009 consensus conference report led by Christina Puchalski and colleagues in the Journal of Palliative Medicine argued that spiritual care should be a standard component of palliative treatment. Yet chaplains often lack frameworks for handling intrusive-thought distress that neither medicalize it nor moralize it. The WATCH model offers a middle path: it gives the chaplain a sequence that is simple enough to use at a bedside, grounded enough to align with clinical evidence about metacognition and scrupulosity, and faithful enough to a theological tradition that care-seekers who frame their suffering religiously will recognize themselves in it. The model also protects against two familiar errors—therapeutic overreach, in which a chaplain drifts into doing unlicensed psychotherapy, and moralistic overreach, in which the caregiver implicitly confirms the care-seeker’s fear that the thought is a sin.

There is also something quietly viral-friendly in the paper’s core claim, because it speaks to an experience far broader than hospital wards. Intrusive thoughts are nearly universal; surveys of healthy populations repeatedly show that unwanted, senseless, even shocking thoughts occur to most people at least occasionally. What distinguishes clinical distress from ordinary mental noise is largely the interpretation layered on top—the belief that the thought means something terrible about the thinker. Evagrius knew this in the desert; Wells and Matthews formalized it in the laboratory; Diaz now hands it to the chaplain in the corridor. When thoughts become verdicts, the paper suggests, the most healing intervention is often the simplest: a non-anxious presence that helps a person watch a thought pass like weather rather than read it as a sentence. In an age when mental health and spiritual life are too often discussed as rivals, a fourth-century monk and a modern meta-analysis agreeing on that point is a finding worth spreading.

The study itself generated no new datasets; it is a conceptual and practical contribution, situated within practical-theological method in the tradition of Richard Osmer’s framework for the discipline. It was published on 31 August 2026 after peer review, with the author noting that AI tools were used for outlining and sentence-level revision while he retained full responsibility for the arguments and citations. Its intended audience is pastoral caregivers, chaplains, and clinically informed clergy, but its central distinction—between having a thought and consenting to it, between the content of thinking and one’s relationship to thinking—offers a genuinely portable insight for anyone who has ever been frightened by their own mind.