Psychology of religion
Especially in the United States, "religion" has for many become associated with sectarian institutions and their obligatory creeds and rituals, thus giving the word a negative cast; "spirituality", in contrast, is positively constructed as deeply individual and subjective, as a universal capacity to apprehend and accord one's life with higher realities.
[7] Today, efforts are ongoing to "operationalize" these terms, with little regard for their history in their Western context, and with the apparent realist assumption that underlying them are fixed qualities identifiable using empirical procedures.
[8] Schnitker and Emmons theorized that the understanding of religion as a search for meaning makes implications in the three psychological areas of motivation, cognition and social relationships.
The cognitive aspects relate to God and a sense of purpose, the motivational ones to the need to control, and the religious search for meaning is also woven into social communities.
His work The Phenomenology of Spirit [14] was a study of how various types of writing and thinking draw from and re-combine with the individual and group experiences of various places and times, influencing the current forms of knowledge and worldviews that are operative in a population.
His works often include detailed descriptions of the psychological motivations involved in thought and behavior, e.g., the struggle of a community or nation to know itself and thus correctly govern itself.
In Hegel's system, Religion is one of the major repositories of wisdom to be used in these struggles, representing a huge body of recollections from humanity's past in various stages of its development.
In Totem and Taboo, he applied the idea of the Oedipus complex (involving unresolved sexual feelings of, for example, a son toward his mother and hostility toward his father) and postulated its emergence in the primordial stage of human development.
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) adopted a very different posture, one that was more sympathetic to religion and more concerned with a positive appreciation of religious symbolism.
According to Adler, only when science begins to capture the same religious fervor, and promotes the welfare of all segments of society, will the two be more equal in peoples' eyes.
Batson refers to extrinsic, intrinsic and quests respectively as religion-as-means, religion-as-end, and religion-as-quest, and measures these constructs on the Religious Life Inventory.
He considered religions to be important influences in successful personality development because they are the primary way that cultures promote the virtues associated with each stage of life.
More recent questionnaires include the Age-Universal I-E Scale of Gorsuch and Venable,[50] the Religious Life Inventory of Batson, Schoenrade and Ventis,[23] and the Spiritual Experiences Index-Revised of Genia.
Under the correspondence hypothesis, internal working models of a person's attachment figure is thought to perpetuate his or her perception of God as a secure base.
These include magical thinking, agency detection, theory of mind that leads to dualism, the notion that "objects and events [serve] an intentional purpose", etc.
[66] Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just as the cardiac, pulmonary, urinary, and immune systems, cognition has a functional structure with a genetic basis, and therefore appeared through natural selection.
[69][70] A study conducted by Francis, Robbins, Lewis, and Barnes investigated the relationship between self-reported prayer frequency and measures of psychoticism and neuroticism according to the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQR-A).
The study included a sample size of 2306 students attending Protestant and Catholic schools in the highly religious culture of Northern Ireland.
Prayer in this manner may prepare an individual to carry out positive pro-social behavior after praying, due to factors such as increased blood flow to the head and nasal breathing.
[78] These offerings have been expanded by Breslin and Lewis (2008) who have constructed a five pathway model between prayer and health with the following mediators: physiological, psychological, placebo, social support, and spiritual.
Although the conceptualizations of chi, the universal mind, divine intervention, and the like breach the boundaries of scientific observation, they are included in this model as possible links between prayer and health so as to not unnecessarily exclude the supernatural from the broader conversation of psychology and religion.
[80] Religious rituals encompass a wide array of practices, but can be defined as the performance of similar actions and vocal expressions based on prescribed tradition and cultural norms.
Many studies regarding religion and prejudice implement religious priming both in the laboratory and in naturalistic settings[97][98] with evidence supporting the perpetuation of ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation in individuals who are high in religiosity.
Recently, reparative or conversion therapy, a religiously motivated process intended to change an individual's sexuality, has been the subject of scrutiny and has been condemned by some governments, LGBT charities, and therapy/counselling professional bodies.
[101] In 2012 a team of psychiatrists, behavioral psychologists, neurologists, and neuropsychiatrists from the Harvard Medical School published research which suggested the development of a new diagnostic category of psychiatric disorders related to religious delusion and hyperreligiosity.
[101] The researchers concluded that "If David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite are appreciated as having psychotic-spectrum beliefs, then the premise becomes untenable that the diagnosis of psychosis must rigidly rely upon an inability to maintain a social group.
A subset of individuals with psychotic symptoms appears able to form intense social bonds and communities despite having an extremely distorted view of reality.
The existence of a better socially functioning subset of individuals with psychotic-type symptoms is corroborated by research indicating that psychotic-like experiences, including both bizarre and non-bizarre delusion-like beliefs, are frequently found in the general population.
Murat Çinici's doctoral dissertation, "Artificial Intelligence and Religiosity: A Methodological Approach to Studies in the Psychology of Religion," provides a framework for integrating AI into this field.
[108] Additionally, in their study Artificial Intelligence and the Psychology of Religion, Çinici and Kızılgeçit explore the broader implications of AI on religious perceptions.
