Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

Relationship between numinous constructs and values.
In the current research, the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and the Schwartz system of values was examined. We aimed to replicate previous findings in a new cultural context with a nonstudent population and extend them by adopting a refined Schwartz values theory. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we demonstrated that religiosity was positively related to conservative values and unrelated to self-transcendence, while spirituality was related positively but weakly to conservative values and positively to self-transcendence. The findings are discussed with reference to Piedmont’s theory of spiritual transcendence, with the assumptions that religiosity represents sentiment grounded in cultural norms, and spirituality represents a universal personality trait that extends from the self to the whole of humanity and nature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
A multidimensional typology of religiosity in three-generation families.
There is broad consensus that religiosity is multidimensional in nature, but little is known regarding how religiosity profiles are similar or different across grandparent, parent, and grandchild generations. In this investigation, we aim to identify religious typologies among grandparents, parents, and grandchildren in a multigenerational sample, and describe similarities in typologies across generations. Data derived from the 2005 wave of the Longitudinal Study of Generation. To address the first aim, latent class analysis and multiple-group latent class analysis were conducted based on 411 grandparents, 705 parents, and 610 grandchildren. To address the second aim, latent transition analysis was conducted based on 216 grandparent–parent–grandchild triads. Results of the latent class analysis showed that same four-class religious typology was identified in three generations: strongly religious, weakly religious, personally religious, and doctrinally religious. In addition, results of latent transition analysis showed that strongly and weakly religious types are more likely to be repeated from grandparent to grandchild generations, compared to personally and doctrinally religious types. Our findings complement previous studies that religiosity is a multidimensional construct and that religiosity class membership at the extremes is largely invariant across three generations. Also, our findings indicate that the two intermediate religious typologies (personally and doctrinally religious) are not as intergenerationally stable as strongly and weakly religious types. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Analytic thinking, religiosity, and defensiveness against secularism: Absence of causality.
This study examined the negative associations between religiosity and analytic thinking and defensiveness against secularism as a potential explanation. In 14 experimental studies, with n = 3,232 (n = 2,615 retained in the final analyses) American Protestant, Catholic, and nonreligious participants, we tested six causal hypotheses: analytic thinking decreases religiosity (H1), analytic thinking decreases defensiveness (H2), defensiveness increases religiosity (H3), religiosity decreases analytic thinking (H4), religiosity increases defensiveness (H5), and defensiveness decreases analytic thinking (H6). Results for each study and meta-analytic results supported none of the hypotheses, and equivalence tests suggested 1/6 of the effects were not essentially different from 0. In conclusion, there was no causal evidence that religiosity and analytic thinking conflicted with each other, and the effects were weak at best. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
“It’s the God factor”: A qualitative study of Syrian Muslims’ postwar religious meaning-making.
Religious meaning-making may facilitate psychological adjustment to even the most extreme traumatic stressors, including war and forced displacement. Yet, few studies have examined the religious meaning-making trajectories of refugees and none from an Islamic perspective. This qualitative cross-sectional study investigated Syrian Muslims’ postwar meaning-making experiences, guided by Park’s (2010) meaning-making model. Thirty-three Syrian Muslim refugees living in Portugal were interviewed 8 years after the onset of the war. Thematic analysis was used to explore cognitive reappraisal processes informed by Islam. The recurrent nature of meaning-making throughout refugees’ displacement trajectories; religious struggles as a key determinant of religious meaning-making; meaning-making as dynamic trajectories with no clear end; place of settlement as a source of meaning; and the ability of Islam to withstand extreme challenges and provide a last-resort narrative, even for those individuals with severely eroded beliefs. Findings highlight the need for practitioners in host countries to incorporate faith and religious traditions in the provision of care. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Seeing god in this place: God concepts are associated with impressions of religious places.
Worship spaces play a critical role in religious life, serving as the center of activity for faith communities. As a consequence, these spaces form strong associations with the deity that is worshiped there. The goal of this project was to investigate the extent to which religious adherents may come to view these spaces in ways that are influenced by their conceptualization of what god is like. This article reports a pair of studies that tests how congregants’ impressions of both their own worship space (Study 1) and novel worship spaces (Study 2) are guided by their god concepts. Participants (N = 478 in Study 1; N = 407 in Study 2) completed measures assessing their conceptualization of god, followed by providing their impressions of a religious setting in terms of its perceptual legibility (i.e., coherence) and mystery (e.g., complexity). In both studies, those who viewed god in highly benevolent terms were more likely to rate religious settings as high in perceptual legibility (i.e., coherent and easy to understand). In contrast, those who conceptualized god as primarily mystical and ineffable were more likely to view these religious settings as high in perceptual mystery (i.e., complex and requiring exploration). These findings reveal how people’s beliefs about god can serve as conceptual filters through which they view the physical world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
In the wake of religious conversions: Differences in cognition and emotion across three religious communities of an indigenous tribe in Malaysia.
The Indigenous spirituality of a hunter-gatherer tribe (Temiar) of Peninsular Malaysia, in the Southeast Asian region, has been fractured by religious conversions into three religious communities—Traditional, Muslim, and Christian. Based on the theoretical framework of strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities (Sundararajan, 2020), this study explored the varying degrees of change in cognition and emotion when the kinship-based spirituality of Indigenous Temiar came under the influence, through conversion, of the globalizing world religions. Thirty-seven traditional-Temiar, 32 Temiar-Muslim, and 32 Temiar-Christian took part in the semistructured interviews which elicited suffering narratives. The transcripts were then translated and back-translated into English for psycholinguistic coding via Sundararajan–Schubert Word Count and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count on linguistic variables that operationalize the cognitive styles and emotional expression profiles. The between-group comparison revealed that traditional-Temiar and Temiar-Muslim groups retained much of the strong-ties cognitive styles of their ancestral niche, as evidenced by a significantly higher score in “collective self-representation” (e.g., we and they) compared to the Temiar-Christian group. For emotional processing, Temiar-Christians overall utilized significantly more “experience-distant modes” (e.g., intellectualization) of emotional expression than their counterparts. This mixed-method study showcased the Indigenous spirituality of an understudied tribe (Temiar) in Peninsular Malaysia. It demonstrated that changes in cognition and emotion can happen within a single generation if the conversion entails systematic weakening of strong-ties rationality, whereas if the conversion is friendly to the kinship-based infrastructures of traditional societies, converts may retain much of the traditional strong-ties rationality. This documentation of stability as well as change of an Indigenous spirituality can shed some light on the resilience and challenges of traditional strong-ties societies in the globalizing era. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Perceptions of divine grace among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Grace, a central construct in Christian and Western culture described as “an act of showing kindness, generosity, or mercy to someone who is undeserving and potentially incapable of returning the kindness shown,” (Bufford et al., 2017, p. 2) is lacking in research of the psychology of religion/spirituality. This study presents a qualitative exploration of perceptions of grace among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Applying a thematic analysis approach to the grounded theory framework, researchers conducted, transcribed, and coded interviews with Latter-day Saints (N = 30) on grace. In this sample, grace is seen as a source of salvation and guidance for all, irrespective of religious affiliation, that inspires gratitude and love toward God and others. Participants perceived grace to be both: (a) granted freely and (b) merit based. Similarly, grace was described as both easily accepted and evoking dissonance. The enormity of the gift of grace was identified as difficult to fully comprehend, inspiring awe and reverence. The importance of mindfulness and spiritual practices in recognizing grace also emerged. Participants strongly advocated that God loves everyone, regardless of beliefs. Grace was described as a generous gift that can evoke a range of emotions (e.g., gratitude, guilt) and behaviors (prayer, seeking guidance, sharing grace with others, striving to be “worthy”) with implications for individual and social functioning. Results inform continued exploration of the role of grace for cultural norms and values, health, and well-being among diverse groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Spirituality and meaning-making across contexts: Structural topic modeling of the Fetzer spirituality study in the United States.
Given the significant shifts in religious affiliation and spiritual seeking over the last 20 years, a rigorous and updated understanding of how spirituality functions are essential to understand the impact of these changes on individuals and society. Drawing on an integrated view of spirituality informed by relational developmental systems (RDS) and meaning-making approaches, in the present study, we sought to identify commonalities within varied expressions of spirituality described within interviews of a religiously and spiritually diverse sample of adults. Structural topic modeling (STM) was applied to infer the latent themes inherent in the in-depth narratives of 16 participants from the Fetzer Institute’s (2020) Study of Spirituality in the United States. Following STM procedures, 1,298 terms were analyzed, resulting in a three-topic model as the best fit. We applied an RDS and contextual lens to name the topics: Individual, Transcendent, and Social, reflecting different systems in which spirituality is experienced. We found evidence that the process of making meaning is common to how people experience, understand, and then live out their spirituality. Our findings suggest that people experience spirituality when ascribing meaning and pursuing purposeful behaviors based on their transcendent beliefs and experiences at the individual, social, and transcendent levels. Our study sheds light on the importance and viability of considering diverse beliefs about and experiences of transcendence and provides unified and contrasting expressions of spirituality as it is lived out in the United States in the early 21st century through vivid descriptions from diverse lived experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Are agnostics associated with immorality to the same degree as atheists?
Past research has demonstrated a pervasive stereotype that links atheists with immorality, but what about agnostics? Using a conjunction fallacy paradigm, the present studies assessed how individuals intuitively associated moral and immoral behavior with agnostics, atheists, and Christians. In Study 1, participants read vignettes about a person engaging in immoral behavior with varying degrees of immorality and then judged the group membership of that individual. In Study 2, participants instead assessed moral deeds. Study 1’s results indicated that individuals attributed immoral behavior equally to agnostics as atheists and attributed immoral behavior to both groups more than Christians. Study 2’s results mirrored Study 1: Individuals attributed moral behavior equally to atheists as agnostics but attributed moral behavior to both groups less than Christians. These findings suggest that perceptions of immorality likely have similar downstream negative consequences for agnostics as atheists. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction on spiritual well-being and hope in patients with breast cancer: A randomized controlled trial.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction is efficacious in reducing mental health symptoms among cancer patients; however, there is a paucity of research of protective concepts such as spiritual well-being and hope and whether such concepts can be cultivated through MBSR among this population. In this trial, we examined the efficacy of a MBSR program in increasing spiritual well-being and hope among patients with breast cancer. This is a two-arm, waitlist randomized controlled trial with pre- and postassessments. This article follows Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials guidelines. Sixty-three patients with breast cancer were recruited and randomly assigned to the intervention (n = 31) or a waitlist control conditions (n = 32). Patients in the intervention condition received a modified MBSR program. All patients in the trial completed measures of spiritual well-being Scale and Snyder Hope Scale pre- and posttreatment. To evaluate trial hypotheses, we conducted per protocol repeated-measures analyses of variances. Patients with breast cancer in the MBSR group reported significant increases from pre–post treatment in total spiritual well-being and hope scores compared to patients in the waitlist control condition. These results suggest MBSR may improve spiritual well-being and hope in patients living with breast cancer. As patients in the current trial were of the Muslim faith, the generalizability of the findings may be limited. Future research needs to include larger samples and patients from different religions to replicate findings. The study emphasizes that MBSR can be considered in oncology care programs by health care professionals, in educational curriculums, and suggested for use among caregivers and breast cancer patients. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The Self-Transcendence Experience Scale: Extracting core constructs.
Self-transcendence has been used both to a process of movement beyond one’s immediate self-boundaries and to a quality that emerges as a result of this process, culminating in a broadened worldview. Due to the elusive character of the construct, there is difficulty in defining and measuring it. The present study attempts to introduce exploratory findings using an Israeli convenience sample (n = 366) in an effort to identify common core constructs in widely used measures of self-transcendence and make a preliminary unified cross-disciplinary self-transcendence assessment tool. Exploratory principal component analysis of the Self-Transcendence Scale, the Adult Self-Transcendence Inventory, the Temperament and Character Inventory Self-Transcendence subscale, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, and the Mysticism Scale was completed.A three-factor structure was revealed: Transpersonal Awareness, Broadening of Experience, and Centeredness. Correlations between the three factors revealed a possible new, integrated conceptualization of self-transcendence as a three-dimensional construct. Further theoretical analysis is required. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
God image as a moderator of God concept’s relation to shame, depression, and existential well-being among seminarians.
God image has been defined as one’s emotional, automatic, and implicit representation of God, and God concept has been defined as one’s analytic, conscious, and explicit beliefs about God. Congruence between these two forms of God representation has been theorized to be a key facet of theistic relational spirituality. As such, the present study sought to examine how congruence between God image and God concept may relate to psychospiritual functioning. Participants were recruited from five Christian seminaries within the United States. Participants completed the Positive/Negative God Go/No-Go Association Task, Explicit Beliefs About God Scale, Internalized Shame Scale, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder–7 scale, Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and the Existential Well-Being (EWB) subscale of the Spiritual Well-Being Scale–Short Form. The sample included 139 seminary students. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that God image significantly moderated the relationship between God concept and three of the four psychospiritual variables (i.e., shame, depression, and EWB) that were assessed. The present findings support the importance of congruence between one’s God concept and God image in relation to well-being. Specifically, results suggest that when one has a positive God image, having a positive God concept is associated with less shame, less depression, and greater EWB. However, among those with a less positive God image, the significant relationships between God concept and these psychospiritual variables are no longer significant. Implications for future research as well as clinical practice and pastoral work are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Of Christians, Jews, and Muslims: When gender is unspecified, the default is men.
Discrimination against members of nonmajority religious groups is widespread, often due to negative stereotypes and emotions toward them. To understand the impact of gender on religious stereotypes and emotions, across two studies, we analyzed stereotypes and emotions toward the men and women of three religious groups: Christians, Jews, and Muslims, to determine the presence of prototypicality biases using intersectional invisibility as the guiding framework. In Study 1 (preregistered, n = 893), participants rated religious groups on four stereotype dimensions: Competence, Warmth, Beliefs, and Americanness, with religion as a within-subject variable and gender as a between-subject variable. In Study 2 (preregistered, n = 915), participants rated religious groups on six emotional dimensions. There was evidence of androcentric biases, as (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) men were perceived as more similar to their respective broader religious groups than (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) women. Additionally, Muslim women, in particular, experienced a double distancing from their identities: They were strongly differentiated from their broader religious category, that is, Muslim, and from their broader gender category, that is, women. While much is known regarding religious groups as a whole, there is relatively little work disaggregating religious groups by gender. This article highlights the importance of intersectionality and incorporating gender when assessing stereotypes and emotions toward religious groups, thereby advancing our theoretical and practical understanding of intergroup conflict and designing interventions applicable to both men and women within religious groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Psychology of Religion and Spirituality - Vol 16, Iss 2