Ralph W. Hood

Empathy, religious orientation, and social desirability.

Summary The Allport and Ross Religious Orientation Scales were administered to 180 undergraduates (84 males, 96 females) who also responded to three empathy questionnaires. Correlations and data associated with religious orientation categories revealed intrinsic religiosity to be directly and extrinsic religiosity to be inversely related to empathy, and social desirability factors apparently did not produce these effects. Recent theoretical arguments concerning a linkage between empathy and religiosity were therefore supported, and the data further suggest that previously reported religiosity-helping behavior relationships may have been mediated by empathic motivation.

The Religious Schema Scale: Construction and Initial Validation of a Quantitative Measure for Religious Styles

This article presents the Religious Schema Scale (RSS). Its conceptual background is the model of religious styles. After a conceptual discussion of the relation between religious styles and religious schemata, the steps of scale construction are reported. Based on 822 responses from research participants in the United States and Germany to a preliminary 78-item version, we used construct-oriented iterative and factor-analytic procedures for reducing the RSS to a 15-item version that consists of three 5-item subscales with acceptable reliabilities. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that the RSS has a robust 3-factor structure, which is cross-culturally valid in both the United States and Germany. We report correlations of the RSS with the Big Five, Psychological Well-Being, Religious Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism. We also present predictive characteristics of the RSS in regard to Fowlers stages of faith. Finally, we report results on the incremental validity of the RSS.

Sin and Self-Functioning, Part 1: Grace, Guilt and Self-Consciousness

An intrinsic religious orientation and beliefs relating to grace tended to predict an Internal State of Awareness, Style Consciousness, and less depression. These outcomes supported the hypothesis that orthodox conceptualizations of sin can promote an adaptive sensitivity to the self and to the self in relation to others; although in some samples these effects may be accompanied by the liability of less assertiveness. Obtained data also demonstrated that an interrelatedness between beliefs dealing with grace and with guilt can create complexities in understanding the influences of sin on self-functioning.

Sin and Self-Functioning, Part 2: Grace, Guilt and Psychological Adjustment

Grace and an intrinsic religious orientation were generally consistent with healthy psychological characteristics as revealed in relationships with self-consciousness, depression, hopelessness and/or self-efficacy. Extrinsicness and orthodox beliefs dealing with guilt tended to predict maladjustment. Several findings suggested that grace can obviate the negative effects of guilt while mediating the positive consequences of intrinsicness, and these data therefore reconfirmed the complex and interrelated influences of sin-related beliefs on self-functioning.

Religiosity, Sin and Self-Esteem

The empirical literature remains largely unsuccessful in clearly defining the functioning of the self within religious persons; and at the same time, a controversy exists within the religious community over how to integrate biblical beliefs about sin with psychological notions associating positive self-regard with mental health. The present study suggests that the wider social controversy is useful in clarifying the empirical problem and that more specifically the languages of sin and of self-esteem are at least partially incompatible. The results indicated that operationalization of religiosity was generally important in defining the nature of religiosity relationships with self-esteem; and more particularly, it was found that a sensitivity to the humanistic language of self-measures and to the guilt dimensions of orthodox views was in fact useful in demonstrating positive associations between self-esteem and a number of religiosity measures including those relating to sin.

Quest and Identity within a Religious Ideological Surround

Current controversies over religious orientation center on issues that appear to be partially nonempirical, normative, and sociological. These issues, in other words, may be ideological. In exploring this possibility, the present study had different religious orientation types evaluate items from the Quest Scale. For a group with an intrinsic commitment, a number of items proved to be antireligious in their implications while one was proreligious. This intrinsic interpretation of Quest also predicted relative mental health, including superior identity formation; and this was especially true for intrinsic subjects themselves. For no other type was the self-definition of Quest as robustly or as discriminatively linked to psychological well-being. The original Quest Scale was tied to poorer self-functioning. Overall, these data demonstrated the importance of measuring not just personal beliefs, but the personal meaning of those beliefs as well.

Sin and Self-Functioning, Part 5: Antireligious Humanistic Values, Individualism, and the Community

Grace alone or in combination with intrinsic religiosity was associated with less narcissistic Exploitiveness, Machiavellianism, and individualism while being congruent with a belief in authority and equalitarianism. Measures of individualism were related to a manipulative style of interpersonal relationships. The failure of religious variables to predict healthy self-functioning as measured by the Personal Orientation Inventory appeared to reflect an antireligious ideological bias built into this humanistically based questionnaire. Although humanistic self-values did not generally promote interpersonal manipulativeness, the data nevertheless supported recent arguments by communitarian theorists that an excessive individualism may have unfortunate social consequences and that beliefs rooted in the biblical tradition may help work against such liabilities.

Sin and Self-Functioning, Part 3: The Psychology and Ideology of Irrational Beliefs

Irrational beliefs identified by Rational-Emotive theory (Ellis, 1962) as pathogenic were related to religious motivations and to orthodox beliefs having to do with sin. An extrinsic religious motivation and beliefs referring to the guilt of others appeared to predict problematic self-functioning. On the other hand, intrinsicness and beliefs about grace displayed complex linkages with irrational thinking and were also associated with less depression. A direct analysis of how subjects evaluated specific beliefs relative to their religious commitments suggested that positive correlations of intrinsicness and of grace with at least some irrational beliefs may not be indicative of true “irrationality.” Instead, religious individuals may be reasoning from a world view that is ideologically incompatible with Rational-Emotive theory.

Intrinsicness, Self-Actualization, and the Ideological Surround

Previous data have suggested that observation of positive relationships between self-actualization and intrinsic religiosity may be made difficult by an antireligious, humanistic element within self-actualization scales. In the present project, the Allport and Ross (1967) Intrinsic Religious Orientation Scale was found to correlate positively with the Short Index of Self-Actualization (SISA), an instrument derived from the humanistically informed Personal Orientation Inventory. Evaluation of each SISA item in terms of personal religious commitments revealed none of the statements to be antireligious, with the vast majority instead being proreligious. Intrinsic Scale relationships with other measures of self-adjustment were roughly explicable in terms of their degree of congruence with religious articulations of self-functioning. These data confirmed that no fundamental incompatibility exists between religiosity and self-actualization and that a direct relationship between the two can occur when no antireligious elements are present in the measure of self-functioning.

The six types of nonbelief: a qualitative and quantitative study of type and narrative

Extensive research has been conducted in exploration of the American religious landscape; however, only recently has social science research started to explore nonbelief in any detail. Research on nonbelief has been limited as most research focuses on the popularity of the religious “nones” or the complexities of alternative faith expressions such as spirituality. Through two studies, one qualitative and one quantitative, this research explored how nonbelievers’ self-identify. Study 1 (the qualitative study) discovered that individuals have shared definitional agreement but use different words to describe different types of nonbelief. Through thematic coding, a typology of six different types of nonbelief was observed. Those are Academic Atheists, Activist Atheist/Agnostics, Seeker Agnostics, Antitheists, Non-Theists, and the Ritual Atheists. Study 2 explored the empirical aspects of these types related to the Big Five Domain, Ryff Psychological Well-Being, Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Multidimensional Anger Inventory, Rokeach Dogmatism Scale, and intersections related to religious and spiritual ontology.