Spirituality

Abstract

Spirituality, which the Medical Subject Headings classify under religion and psychology, is the search for and relationship with whatever a person holds sacred, whether framed in the terms of an established religion or apart from any institution. Psychology treats it not as a question of doctrine but as a measurable dimension of experience, motivation, and coping. This article defines spirituality and separates it from religiousness, surveys the self-report instruments that quantify it, and examines its cognitive and neural substrates in prayer, meditation, and the self-transcendent emotion of awe. It then reviews how spiritual and religious coping relate to mental and physical health, distinguishing the patterns that help from those that harm, and closes with the field's turn toward causal tests. Three interactive demonstrations accompany the account.

Keywords: spirituality, religion and psychology, self-transcendence

For most of the twentieth century scientific psychology kept spirituality at arm's length, treating it as the province of theology or as a symptom to be explained away. That reluctance has reversed. Spirituality is now studied as a robust individual difference with its own measures, correlates, and mechanisms, distinct from religious affiliation and predictive of how people find meaning, regulate emotion, and cope with adversity (Hill & Pargament, 2003). The shift began with William James, whose insistence that personal religious experience, rather than institutional creed, was the proper object of study set the agenda the field eventually resumed (Emmons, 2000).

What Spirituality Is

Within psychology, spirituality is most usefully defined as the search for the sacred, the process through which people seek, and relate to, whatever they perceive as holy, transcendent, or of ultimate worth (Hill & Pargament, 2003). The definition is deliberately broad on the object and precise on the process: the sacred may be a personal God, a diffuse higher power, nature, or a secular ideal invested with transcendent significance, but the psychological signature is the same, an orientation of striving toward something held apart from the ordinary and endowed with special meaning. This framing lets the construct be studied empirically without adjudicating any theological claim. The process by which an ordinary object, goal, or relationship comes to be perceived as holding sacred significance is termed sanctification, and it is what extends spirituality beyond the explicitly religious: a marriage, a vocation, or the natural world can each be sanctified and thereby drawn into the spiritual search (Hill & Pargament, 2003).

Spirituality overlaps with, but is not the same as, religiousness. Religiousness locates the search for the sacred within the beliefs, rituals, and community of an organized tradition; spirituality names the search itself, which can occur inside or outside such a framework (Zinnbauer et al., 1997). Because the two vary somewhat independently, populations sort into four patterns rather than a single dimension: people who are both religious and spiritual, those who are spiritual but not religious, those who are religious but not spiritual, and those who are neither. Treating the terms as interchangeable, or as opposites, obscures this structure; the religion and psychology field under which the Medical Subject Headings file spirituality studies precisely how the two relate.

Some theorists have gone further, proposing that spirituality is not merely a domain of behaviour but an organized capacity of the person. Emmons argued that spirituality meets several criteria of an intelligence, a set of abilities for using spiritual information to solve problems of meaning and to pursue what he called ultimate concern, the person's deepest and most integrative goals (Emmons, 2000). Whether or not the label of intelligence holds, the proposal usefully reframed spirituality as a functional system bound up with motivation and cognition rather than a residue of belief.

Defining and Measuring Spirituality

If spirituality is to be a scientific variable it must be measured, and the modern field is in large part a history of instruments. The methodological turning point was the recognition that global, one-item questions about religious affiliation capture almost none of what matters psychologically; what is needed are multidimensional scales that separate belief, practice, motivation, and experience (Hill & Pargament, 2003). The earliest psychometric step in this direction was Allport's distinction between an intrinsic religious orientation, in which faith is lived as an ultimate end in itself, and an extrinsic orientation, in which religion serves social or personal ends; the two orientations predict different outcomes, and the distinction established religiousness as a measurable motivation rather than a single quantity of belief (Allport & Ross, 1967). Two strategies have since proved especially productive. The first assesses spiritual experience directly. The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale, for instance, asks not about doctrine but about the frequency of ordinary transcendent moments, feeling connection, awe, gratitude, or the presence of something greater, and shows high reliability and a clear single factor across religious and secular respondents alike (Underwood & Teresi, 2002).

The second strategy locates spirituality within the established architecture of personality. Piedmont developed a measure of spiritual transcendence, the capacity to stand outside one's immediate sense of time and place and view life from a larger, unifying perspective, and showed that it predicts consequential outcomes over and above the five-factor model of personality (Piedmont, 1999). That incremental validity is the crucial result: it demonstrates that spirituality is not simply a relabelling of agreeableness or openness but carries unique variance, and it is quantified in the Worked Example below. Cross-cultural work has since organized the religious and spiritual domain into a small number of recurring dimensions, distinguishing what people believe, how they bond emotionally with the sacred, how they behave morally, and how they belong to a community, a structure that recurs across very different cultures (Saroglou, 2011). Table 1 sets out the most influential of these approaches side by side.

The Neuroscience of Spiritual Experience

If spirituality is a natural human capacity, it must be realized in the brain, and neuroimaging has begun to map how. The consistent finding is that spiritual and religious states recruit ordinary, general-purpose neural systems rather than any dedicated module: the networks for attention, emotion, self-representation, and social cognition are engaged in configurations characteristic of the practice, not a spiritual organ waiting to be discovered (Newberg, 2014). Different practices show different signatures. Meditative states that cultivate focused attention and a dissolving sense of self are associated with changes in frontal and parietal regions that support attentional control and the bodily sense of location, consistent with the phenomenology of self-loss.

Prayer is especially revealing because it is, psychologically, a form of address. When committed believers engage in personal, improvised prayer, they recruit the brain regions ordinarily used to think about other people's minds, the theory-of-mind network, treating God as an intentional agent to be spoken with rather than an abstract idea to be contemplated (Schjoedt et al., 2009). This finding grounds a broader theoretical claim from the cognitive science of religion: that religious and spiritual cognition are by-products of mental systems that evolved for other purposes, above all the agency-detection and social-reasoning systems that make supernatural agents so intuitive and memorable (Boyer, 2003). On this account spirituality is not an add-on to the mind but a natural consequence of how ordinary cognition works.

A complementary framework tries to specify the mechanisms by which contemplative practice changes the self. The self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence model proposes that practices such as mindfulness meditation work through a staged reorganization of self-related processing, from heightened awareness of present experience, through improved regulation of attention and emotion, to a loosening of the narrative self that underlies reports of transcendence (Vago & Silbersweig, 2012). It links the neuroscience of meditation and mindfulness to the experiential core of spirituality.

Awe and Self-Transcendence

The emotional heart of spiritual experience is increasingly located in a family of self-transcendent emotions, and awe is their prototype. Keltner and Haidt analyzed awe as the emotion elicited by perceived vastness, something so large in size, number, beauty, or authority that it exceeds the person's ordinary frames of reference, together with a consequent need for accommodation, the mental work of updating those frames to take the vast thing in (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). When both conditions are met, the result is a distinctive experience in which attention turns outward, the ordinary concerns of the self recede, and the person feels part of something larger. That shrinking of self-salience, the small self, is what makes awe a bridge from momentary emotion to enduring spiritual orientation.

Yaden and colleagues placed awe within a wider taxonomy of self-transcendent experiences, ranging from mild states of absorption and flow through awe and peak experiences to the intense, unitive states reported in mystical experience, all sharing two features: a reduced sense of self and an increased sense of connection (Yaden et al., 2017). This framework makes the varieties of spiritual experience a graded continuum rather than a set of unrelated phenomena, and it connects contemporary emotion science to the tradition William James began. Van Cappellen and colleagues have shown that these positive, self-transcendent emotions are not incidental to religion and spirituality but partly constitutive of them and central to their effects, mediating the well-documented link between religious engagement and well-being (Van Cappellen et al., 2016). The emotions of elevation, gratitude, awe, and love, on this view, are the psychological currency through which spiritual life does its work (Van Cappellen, 2017).

Spirituality, Coping, and Health

The most practically consequential body of research concerns how people draw on the sacred when life goes wrong. Pargament's work on religious coping showed that turning to the sacred under stress is not one thing but many, and that the crucial distinction is between positive and negative patterns (Pargament et al., 2000). Positive religious coping, seeking spiritual support, reframing a hardship as an opportunity for growth, collaborating with a benevolent God, predicts better psychological adjustment. Negative religious coping, the spiritual struggle expressed as feeling punished or abandoned by God, questioning the sacred, or seeing an event as the work of evil forces, predicts poorer mental health and, in some longitudinal studies, higher mortality. The content of the coping, not merely its intensity, determines its effect.

At the population level, the association between religious or spiritual involvement and health is real but must be read carefully. Large reviews find that greater involvement is, on average, modestly associated with better mental health, lower rates of depression and suicide, and in some domains better physical health, though the effects are heterogeneous and confounded by the social and behavioural correlates of religious life (Koenig, 2012). The strongest causal leverage comes from prospective designs. An outcome-wide analysis following adolescents into young adulthood found that those raised with regular religious practice later reported greater life satisfaction, more positive affect, more volunteering, and lower rates of depression and risky behaviour, associations that persisted after extensive adjustment for baseline confounders (Chen & VanderWeele, 2018). Such evidence does not license a simple prescription, but it does establish spirituality and religiousness as consequential social determinants of health worth understanding mechanistically.

Worked Example

The claim that spirituality carries unique psychological weight rests on incremental validity, and the logic can be made concrete with the arithmetic of variance explained. Suppose a study predicts a psychosocial outcome, prosocial behaviour, from the five factors of personality and obtains a multiple correlation of R = 0.40, so the five factors together account for R² = 0.16, or 16% of the variance in the outcome. The question Piedmont posed is whether a measure of spiritual transcendence explains anything more (Piedmont, 1999).

Suppose spiritual transcendence has a semipartial correlation of sr = 0.25 with the outcome after the five factors are held constant. The variance it adds is the square of that semipartial correlation: ΔR² = 0.25² = 0.0625, an extra 6.25 percentage points. The full model now explains R²_full = 0.16 + 0.0625 = 0.2225, so R_full = √0.2225 = 0.4717. The proportional gain is striking: the added variance of 0.0625 is 0.0625 / 0.16 = 0.39, meaning spiritual transcendence increases the explained variance by 39% over personality alone.

The effect size of the addition is expressed by Cohen's f², the added variance divided by the variance still unexplained by the full model: f² = ΔR² / (1 − R²_full) = 0.0625 / (1 − 0.2225) = 0.0625 / 0.7775 = 0.080. By Cohen's benchmarks (0.02 small, 0.15 medium), this is a small but non-trivial unique contribution, of the magnitude routinely reported for spiritual transcendence over the five-factor model. The point of the calculation is conceptual: because ΔR² is strictly positive, spiritual transcendence cannot be fully reduced to the personality factors, which is exactly the empirical claim that a distinct construct requires. The `SpiritualTranscendenceDemo` above lets these quantities be varied directly.

Discussion

Spirituality has moved from the margins of psychology to a well-instrumented research program with a coherent shape. Conceptually, the field settled on a definition, the search for the sacred, general enough to include the religiously unaffiliated yet precise enough to be operationalized, and it separated that search from institutional religiousness without severing the two (Hill & Pargament, 2003; Zinnbauer et al., 1997). Psychometrically, it produced measures whose incremental validity over established personality dimensions establishes spirituality as more than a synonym for traits already named (Piedmont, 1999). Mechanistically, it located spiritual cognition in ordinary neural and psychological systems, attention, self-representation, social cognition, and emotion, rather than in a special faculty, which is what makes it a tractable object for cognitive science (Newberg, 2014; Boyer, 2003).

What unifies the strands is a shift from asking whether spirituality is true to asking what it does. The emotion science of awe and self-transcendence supplies a candidate common mechanism, a temporary quieting of the self that opens the person to connection, and the coping and health literatures show that the consequences are measurable and sometimes large (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Chen & VanderWeele, 2018). The persistent challenge is causal inference. Because spirituality cannot be randomly assigned, most evidence is correlational and vulnerable to confounding by the dense social and behavioural fabric of religious life, and the field's central task is to isolate what is doing the work.

Current Directions

Much of the current momentum is in the science of self-transcendent emotion. Awe has become a target of experimental and applied work as evidence accumulates that brief, deliberately induced experiences of awe, in nature, in the laboratory, or through virtual environments, can reduce self-focus, increase generosity, and improve markers of mental and physical health, making awe a testable pathway from spiritual experience to well-being rather than a mere epiphenomenon (Monroy & Keltner, 2023). Parallel work is building an integrative taxonomy of self-transcendent experiences and refining the measures that distinguish mild absorption from full mystical states, so that the varieties James described can be compared on common scales (Yaden et al., 2017).

A second front strengthens causal inference. Outcome-wide longitudinal designs and quasi-experimental methods are being used to estimate the effects of religious and spiritual involvement while adjusting simultaneously for many outcomes and confounders, moving the health literature beyond the cross-sectional associations that dominated it (Chen & VanderWeele, 2018). A third examines the affective mechanisms that carry spirituality's effects, testing whether the well-being associated with religious engagement is mediated specifically by cultivated positive emotions such as gratitude, awe, and love (Van Cappellen et al., 2016). Across these threads the ambition is the same as elsewhere in the field: to replace the question of whether spirituality matters with a specification of how.

Common Misconceptions

Spirituality and religion are the same thing.

They overlap but are distinct. Religiousness ties the search for the sacred to an organized tradition, while spirituality names the search itself, which many people pursue outside any institution; the two vary partly independently, producing people who are spiritual but not religious and religious but not spiritual (Zinnbauer et al., 1997).

Spirituality is just a warmer word for a personality trait.

Measures of spiritual transcendence predict outcomes over and above the five-factor model of personality, carrying unique variance that agreeableness and openness do not, which is precisely the evidence that it is a separate construct rather than a relabelling (Piedmont, 1999).

The brain has a dedicated spirituality center.

Neuroimaging finds that spiritual practices recruit ordinary, general-purpose systems for attention, emotion, self-representation, and social cognition in practice-specific configurations, not a single spiritual organ (Newberg, 2014; Schjoedt et al., 2009).

Religion and spirituality are uniformly good for health.

The effects are real but heterogeneous, and their sign depends on content. Negative religious coping, feeling punished or abandoned by the sacred, predicts worse mental health and higher mortality, so the sacred can harm as well as help (Pargament et al., 2000; Koenig, 2012).

Glossary

Awe.

A self-transcendent emotion elicited by perceived vastness that exceeds one's frames of reference and requires mental accommodation, characteristically diminishing the salience of the self.

Daily Spiritual Experience Scale.

A validated self-report instrument measuring the frequency of ordinary transcendent experiences, such as connection, awe, and gratitude, across religious and secular respondents.

Incremental validity.

The extent to which a measure predicts an outcome over and above established predictors; for spirituality, its predictive power beyond the five-factor model of personality.

Intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation.

Allport's distinction between religion lived as an ultimate end in itself (intrinsic) and religion used as a means to social or personal ends (extrinsic); the first psychometric treatment of religiousness as motivation.

Need for accommodation.

In the appraisal theory of awe, the mental work of revising one's existing schemas to take in something that does not fit them, the second condition, with vastness, for awe.

Negative religious coping.

A maladaptive pattern of drawing on the sacred under stress, marked by feeling punished or abandoned by God and spiritual struggle, and associated with poorer adjustment.

Positive religious coping.

An adaptive pattern of drawing on the sacred under stress, including seeking spiritual support and benevolent reappraisal, and associated with better psychological adjustment.

Religiousness.

The search for the sacred as expressed through the beliefs, practices, and community of an organized religious tradition; overlapping with but distinct from spirituality.

Sacred.

Whatever a person perceives as holy, transcendent, or of ultimate worth, the object toward which the spiritual search is directed, whether theistic or secular.

Sanctification.

The psychological process by which an object, goal, or aspect of life comes to be perceived as having sacred significance, extending spirituality beyond the explicitly religious.

Search for the sacred.

The core psychological definition of spirituality: the process of seeking, and relating to, whatever one perceives as sacred.

Self-transcendent emotion.

An emotion, such as awe, elevation, gratitude, or love, that directs attention beyond the self and fosters a sense of connection to something larger.

Small self.

The subjective diminishment of the self's importance that accompanies awe and related self-transcendent states, associated with reduced self-focus and greater prosociality.

Spiritual transcendence.

The capacity to view life from a broad, unifying perspective beyond one's immediate time and place; a measurable dimension that predicts outcomes beyond the five-factor model.

Ultimate concern.

A person's deepest, most integrative goals and values, which in Emmons's account spirituality serves to identify and pursue.

Key Researchers

Gordon W. Allport. Psychologist (1897–1967) who introduced the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation, the first psychometric treatment of religiousness as a form of motivation and a direct forerunner of the modern measurement of spirituality. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Patty Van Cappellen. Social psychologist at Duke University; her work establishes self-transcendent positive emotions such as awe, elevation, and love as central to religion and spirituality and as mediators of their link to well-being. ORCID - Faculty Page

William James. Philosopher and psychologist (1842–1910) whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) founded the empirical study of personal religious and spiritual experience, insisting that experience rather than institution was the proper object of psychology. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Dacher Keltner. Emotion scientist at the University of California, Berkeley; with Jonathan Haidt he developed the appraisal theory of awe as a self-transcendent emotion and has led much of the experimental work linking awe to the small self and to well-being. Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Abraham H. Maslow. Psychologist (1908–1970) whose account of peak experiences and self-actualization brought transcendent states into humanistic psychology and anticipated the contemporary study of self-transcendent experience. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Andrew B. Newberg. Neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University and a founder of neurotheology; he pioneered the neuroimaging of prayer and meditation and the synthesis of that work into a general account of the neuroscience of spiritual practice. Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Kenneth I. Pargament. Clinical psychologist (b. 1950) at Bowling Green State University; he built the psychology of religious and spiritual coping, developing the RCOPE and establishing the crucial distinction between positive and negative religious coping. ORCID - Faculty Page - Wikipedia

David B. Yaden. Psychologist at Johns Hopkins University; he developed an integrative taxonomy of self-transcendent experiences and studies the varieties, measurement, and effects of spiritual and mystical states. ORCID - Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is spirituality in psychology?
In psychology spirituality is defined as the search for the sacred, the process of seeking and relating to whatever a person perceives as holy, transcendent, or of ultimate worth. The definition is broad about the object, which may be theistic or secular, and precise about the process, letting the construct be studied empirically without settling any theological question (Hill & Pargament, 2003).

How is spirituality different from religion?
Religiousness ties the search for the sacred to the beliefs, rituals, and community of an organized tradition, whereas spirituality names the search itself, which can occur inside or outside such a framework. The two are correlated but vary partly independently, so people can be spiritual without being religious and religious without being spiritual (Zinnbauer et al., 1997).

Can spirituality be measured scientifically?
Yes. Validated multidimensional scales assess spiritual experience, motivation, and transcendence with good reliability. The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale, for example, measures ordinary transcendent moments across religious and secular respondents, and measures of spiritual transcendence predict outcomes over and above standard personality traits (Underwood & Teresi, 2002; Piedmont, 1999).

Is there a spirituality center in the brain?
No. Neuroimaging shows that spiritual and religious states engage ordinary, general-purpose systems for attention, emotion, self-representation, and social cognition in configurations specific to each practice, rather than any single dedicated region. Personal prayer, for instance, recruits the brain's theory-of-mind network (Newberg, 2014; Schjoedt et al., 2009).

What is awe and why does it matter for spirituality?
Awe is a self-transcendent emotion elicited by perceived vastness that exceeds one's usual frames of reference and requires mental accommodation. It shrinks the salience of the self and increases feelings of connection, making it a leading candidate mechanism by which spiritual experience influences well-being and prosocial behaviour (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Monroy & Keltner, 2023).

Is spirituality good for mental and physical health?
On average, greater religious and spiritual involvement is modestly associated with better mental health and some better physical health outcomes, but the effects are heterogeneous and depend on content. Positive religious coping predicts better adjustment, whereas negative coping, feeling punished or abandoned by the sacred, predicts worse outcomes (Koenig, 2012; Pargament et al., 2000).

What is spiritual transcendence?
Spiritual transcendence is the capacity to stand outside one's immediate sense of time and place and view life from a broader, unifying perspective. Piedmont showed that it predicts consequential outcomes beyond the five-factor model of personality, which is the key evidence that spirituality is a distinct construct rather than a relabelling of existing traits (Piedmont, 1999).

Are self-transcendent experiences all the same?
No. They form a graded continuum, from mild states of absorption and flow, through awe and peak experiences, to intense unitive and mystical states, all sharing a reduced sense of self and an increased sense of connection but differing in intensity and quality (Yaden et al., 2017).

References