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Religion is often understood to play a positive role in shaping moral attitudes among believers. We assessed the relationship between church members’ levels of felt connectedness to their respective congregations and perceived similarity in personal and congregational moral values, and whether there was a relationship between these and the amount of time spent in synchronous movement or singing during worship. The similarity between personal and perceived congregational moral importance (the importance assigned to different moral items) was correlated with feelings of closeness to one’s congregation but not by the amount of time spent in synchronous movement or singing. Differences in moral foundations scores and in moral importance of specific issues were found between different theological traditions. These findings demonstrate that, for churchgoers, there is a relationship between the use of music or synchronous movement in a church service and feelings of social bonding and there is also a relationship between the degree to which churchgoers identify with their church community and the degree to which they believe their priorities match those of their church. Furthermore, differences in theological tradition appear to be reflected in differences in moral values.

Robin Dunbar’s How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures rehabilitates the long-standing anthropo- logical view that religion evolved in two phases. The first, shamanic phase of religion consisted mainly of trance-dancing practices in hunter-gatherer societies, followed by a later stage in which beliefs about gods became more elaborate. Dunbar dates the transition to this later phase of “doctrinal” reli- gion as coming in with the agrarian settlements of the Neolithic period, 10,000 years ago. The first, practice-based phase of religion used to be called “primitive”, which implied a pejorative view of it, but there is no such condescension in Dunbar’s two-phase theory of the evolution of religion.We will focus here on the distinction between shamanic and doctrinal religion, and elaborate a theoretical position about the different modes of human cognition associated with shamanic and doctrinal religion. We will relate these two phases in the evolution of religion to the two different modes of cognition that have been identified in humans, sometimes called “experiential” and “rational” (Watts, 2020).In How Religion Evolved, Dunbar uses his evolutionary perspective on religion as an interpretive lens for understanding the current state of religion in Western society. We will here extend his approach to the distinction that is now often made between religion and spirituality, suggesting that the religion that is currently being rejected is a form of doctrinal religion, and that there is a turn to spirituality that in some ways (though not in every way) is like shamanic religion.Finally, we will compare Dunbar’s approach to the evolution of religion with the evolutionary Cognitive Science of Religion, suggesting that Dunbar’s approach benefits from the distinction between shamanic and doctrinal religion; from focusing on practices and experience as well as beliefs; and from taking a socially-embedded rather than an individualistic approach.

Several accounts of the evolution of religion distinguish two phases: an earlier shamanic stage and a later doctrinal stage. Similarly, several theories of human cognition distinguish two cognitive modes: a phylogenetically older system that is largely intuitive and a later, more distinctively human system that is more rational and articulate. This article suggests that cognition in the earlier stage in the evolution of religion is largely at the level of intuition, whereas the cognition of doctrine or religion is more conceptual and rational. Early religious cognition is more embodied and is more likely to carry healing benefits. The evolutionary origins of religion in humans seem to depend on developments in the cognitive architecture. It is further suggested that the cognition of early religion shows less conceptual differentiation, is characteristically participatory rather than objectifying and is less individualistic. The development of religion in recent centuries appears to show some approximate recapitulation of the stages through which religion originally evolved.

This article examines the experience of online worship among 13 participants ‘attending’ virtual services in Cambridge. We focus upon an online formal Eucharistic service and a more informal Sunday evening non-Eucharistic service. After providing an overview of the literature on online religion, more specifically the possibility of a virtual religious community and the performance of online Eucharist, we present data from semi-structured interviews which were analysed through thematic analysis. The interviews reveal that virtual services, while better than nothing, have significant limitations in terms of participation, belonging, and the kind of religious experience engendered. While only two participants expressed the view that the virtual service was better than the live service, the majority found that the virtual service lacked a sense of connectedness. However, everyone agreed that it was different from a television broadcast in several important ways. The overall view was that celebrating the Eucharist was not possible online, because congregants could not actually partake of the bread and wine blessed by the priest which, for them, was an essential aspect of the ritual. For most people there was neither spiritual communion, nor a belief in consecration at a distance, leaving them feeling they were not really participating in the Eucharist. The participants in the study who engaged with both the Eucharist in the morning and the non-Eucharistic service in the evening generally seem to have preferred the latter. The data from this study are congruent with studies of diverse faiths which reveal the perceived importance of physical presence, contact and connection as being important for ritual effectiveness.

Though the concept of ‘emotion’ is often accepted uncritically, a historical approach shows that, in the form it takes in modern psychology, it is a product of the 19th century, and replaced an earlier more differentiated vocabulary. In the 17th century there had been another significant shift in the meaning of emotion words when they came to refer to subjective feelings in a new way. There has been much controversy about the concept of ‘basic’ emotions, which is unpopular with historians of emotion. However, I am persuaded that some such distinction is needed; a distinction between primary and secondary emotions is somewhat akin to the earlier distinction between passions and affections. Emotions have various manifestations, including behavioural, physiological and subjective. These are often aligned, though they do not have to be. There has been considerable interest in the couplings between different manifestations. Most current work on the history of emotions is being done by historians but it would be good to see more psychological interest in a historical approach to emotions, and cross fertilisation between the work of historians and psychologists.

Religious rituals are associated with health benefits, potentially produced via social bonding. It is unknown whether secular rituals similarly increase social bonding. We conducted a field study with individuals who celebrate secular rituals at Sunday Assemblies and compared them with participants attending Christian rituals. We assessed levels of social bonding and affect before and after the rituals. Results showed the increase in social bonding taking place in secular rituals is comparable to religious rituals. We also found that both sets of rituals increased positive affect and decreased negative affect, and that the change in positive affect predicted the change in social bonding observed. Together these results suggest that secular rituals might play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect.

This rejoinder acknowledges the empirical gaps and theoretical/theological disharmony highlighted in the three selected commentaries on Place Spirituality (PS), but we defend our central argument about the developmental pathways of PS. First, we provide an overview of recent studies on PS, highlighting what has been done so far in the field. Second, we draw from the commentaries to advance the understanding of PS in relation to three world religions: Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. Third, we evaluate the normative aspects of PS as a transactional versus transitional phenomenon. Finally, we defend the two contested developmental pathways to PS, involving the compensation and correspondence working models of attachment, while complementing these models using the motivational systems framework. We maintain that these models are relevant for understanding the relationship between religious attachment and place attachment among religious and non-religious people. Recommendations for further studies are made in relation to the broader implications of PS.

Religious rituals are universal human practices, generally practiced in groups. Social scientists have highlighted for over 100 years its role in bonding individuals, but the mechanisms underlying this function have yet to be explored. Here we tested the role of mu-opioids in fostering social bonding in rituals across two double-blind studies. For both studies a mu-opioid blocker (Naltrexone) was taken before the ritual and we assessed strength of social bonding before and after the ritual. Participants were randomly allocated into a placebo or Naltrexone condition. For study 1 (N = 9), we conducted a pilot, yoga-based ritual session in our lab. In study 2 (N = 24), we conducted a naturalistic field study with participants who regularly attended an Afro-Brazilian religious ritual. We found the same effect across both studies, where Naltrexone lead to significantly lower social bonding compared to placebo. These studies show that mu-opioids play a significant role in experiences of social bonding within ritual contexts.

Why people seek help is a question shared by both health psychologists and scholars of spiritual healing. This overlap, however, has gone unexplored. This article shows convergence between health help-seeking behaviours in spiritual healing and secular professional health services. It does so by drawing on the archival records from the Panacea Society in Bedford, England, which began an international healing ministry by post-amassing over 120,000 correspondents from 93 different countries. Archives from the Panacea Society’s Healing Department containing records of the self-reported effects of the prescribed water-taking healing ritual were used to investigate variables related to help-seeking for health problems through spiritual healing. A sample of over 10% of the available records (n = 7192) contained data from 40,627 letters written over a 73-year period from 48 different countries. In line with research from health psychology, and specifically the Health Belief Model, findings showed that those who were older, female, and receiving perceived benefits from treatment were more likely to engage in help-seeking.

A key function of religious rituals is their ability to connect or bond individuals. Recent advances on the neurobiological underpinnings of bonding, highlighting how opioids are activated in the brain by social activities, can now be applied to the study of rituals. Here we present the results of a large-scale field study conducted across the UK and Brazil where we examined the psychobiological functions of rituals, following the brain-opioid theory of social attachment (BOTSA). Testing was conducted across 24 sessions at Christian and Afro-Brazilian religious rituals (N=358), with measures taken before and after each ritual. Regression analysis and multilevel linear modelling showed that taking part in religious rituals increased both pain threshold (a proxy for opioid activation) and positive affect, and that these enhanced the sense of bonding to one’s religious group. The results suggest that one of the key functions of religious ritual is to increase community bonding.

This paper begins from empirical research relevant to the sense that there is something ‘beyond’ the everyday self, the work of David Hay in which he asked people whether they had experienced ‘a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’ About a third of the population reported that they had. I suggest that such experiences arise from a synthesis of an experiential component that is hard-wired, global, and relatively independent of faith and culture, and an interpretative factor that is specific to faith, culture and context. The idea of ‘something more’ is the other side of a restricted naturalism, but there is no need to adopt the dualism implicit in the distinction between the everyday and the beyond. An alternative is an emancipated view of nature in which the transcendent is not distinct from the natural but connected with it. When something beyond is postulated in contemporary culture, it is often not framed in theistic terms but represents a vague sense of something beyond that is neither naturalistic nor theistic.

The relationships between psychology, religion and the transpersonal are difficult to clarify because of confusion and uncertainty about the key terms. ‘Religion’ is so diverse that there is no single essence of religion that is found in all its manifestations. The ‘transpersonal’ is also hard to define, one of the issues being that it is often defined largely in what it goes ‘beyond’ rather than what it is in itself. It is suggested that interest in the transpersonal has migrated out of religion and in some respects remains a quasi-religion. Finally there is often an ambiguity in how psychology should engage with religion, spirituality and the transpersonal, whether it should play the role of the detached observer or whether it should participate in what it is also studying. I suggest that it should do both and should integrate them as best it can, rather than choosing one over the other.

There has been much recent work on emotion by historians, and three recent books on the history of emotions are reviewed: What is the History of Emotions? by Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Christiani; The History of Emotions by Rob Boddice; and The History of Emotions: An Introduction by Jan Plamper. Key debates are how to handle the fact that different periods have used different vocabulary for apparently similar emotions, how to find a path between the extremes of universalism and social constructionism, and how to characterise the social structures that regulate the expression of emotions. The work on emotions by historians includes a critical assessment of the study of emotions by psychologists.

Recent developments toward a more holistic biology do not eliminate reductionism and determinism, but they do suggest more complex forms of them, in which there are multiple, interacting influences, as there are in complex or chaotic systems. Though there is a place in biology for both systemic and atomistic modes of explanation, for those with a theological perspective the shift to complex explanations in biology is often welcome. It suggests a more subtle view of divine action in which God's purposes are affected through engagement with the complex systems of creation rather than by discrete interventions. It also invites us to connect the biological interdependence with the interdependence in the nature and purposes of God, and it is consonant with a mystical vision of the unity of all things.

Religion is a multi-faceted phenomenon including cognition, behavior, experience and more. It is also very diverse; there are many different forms of religion, depending on evolutionary context, culture, personality and so on. In view of this it is misleading to make claims about anything as broad and general as “religion”, without specifying what kind of religion is under the spotlight. There is a danger of erroneous extrapolation from one specific form of religion to religion in general. Another danger is of studying such mixed and diverse forms of religion that there is little prospect of discovering anything that they all have in common. Though there is much that is commendable in these Hilbert papers, their most conspicuous weakness is the tendency to over-generalize about religion.

The paper presents a case study in the interdisciplinary comparison of psychology and a related non-psychological intellectual tradition. Specifically, it will aim to bring into dialogue conceptions of the self in contemporary psychology and Christian theology and look at the growing body of work that brings the two perspectives into dialogue. It will be suggested that it is helpful to distinguish different kinds of psychological theory, such as representational and experiential theories, as the experience of a unitary self can exist alongside representational self-pluralism, and also to distinguish different theological traditions according to what assumptions they make about the origin of the soul. Neither tradition is monolithic in its approach. What at first appears to be a debate between psychology and theology can actually be found within both disciplines.

This chapter clarifies the psychology of religion and place (PRP) by providing conceptual and operational definition of the concept as a first step in the systematic analysis of PRP for future research. Concept analysis is a method designed by Walker and Avant (Strategies for Theory Construction in Nursing. Pearson, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2011) for identifying the defining attributes of a concept. Drawing on this analytical method, we identify the attributes and characteristics of PRP and its theoretical and practical applications to the field of psychology. Sample cases were extracted from chapters in our current book, which illustrate PRP further as the constellation of subjective relational and spiritual experiences in spatial settings. This operational definition is based on the following defining attributes of PRP as (1) the relational experience between two, or more, entities; (2) the spiritual experiences in sacred places with connections to the past; (3) experiencing the sacred in natural environments; (4) spaces where identity and attachment are formed; and, (5) resilience and meaning-making in places of religious significance. PRP was further classified and defined in terms of its antecedents (how it starts), consequences (the effects), exemplar cases and referents. Further research in the field needs to examine the cross-cultural dimensions of PRP and develop instruments for assessing it.

This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together how place has been understood and experienced in the Judeo-Christian tradition with recent psychological approaches to the significance of place. The first part of the chapter focuses on natural environments, taking the Hebrew Bible as a significant cultural document providing insights into how the sense of place evolved as nomadic life gave way to permanent settlements, and as early animistic consciousness faded and was replaced by one with a stronger sense of inhabiting a created environment. The significance of religious buildings is then considered. Sometimes a building takes on religious significance for a particular individual; sometimes a body of people develop together a shared understanding of its religious importance. Sometimes God is felt to speak powerfully to a person in a particular place; sometimes there is a more complicated sense of both presence and absence, as in the poetry of R. S. Thomas. Finally, there is a discussion of the religious ambivalence about place. Religious traditions partly venerate particular places, but they can also have a sense of the importance of transcending attachment to them.

This chapter introduces the psychology of religion and place as a significant and emerging interdisciplinary field for understanding the constellation of subjective relational and spiritual experiences in spatial settings. We carefully consider ways readers can benefit from the study of religion and place as a psychological phenomenon involving perceptual objects found in between spaces of transition and transaction. Religion and place were further explored as conceptual windows for understanding human behaviours, personality and life span development across time and space. Finally, the chapter highlights how the psychology of religion and place, as an emerging interdisciplinary field, has been treated by all the contributors in the book as experiences that provide a sense of security, identity and connection to the past.

This paper considers two significant developments in mental health services in the 1960s, the development of behaviour therapy and of psychiatric rehabilitation. Though these are often assumed to be unrelated it is argued here that they have significant common features, notably a spirit of optimism and practicality. This is based on the working assumption that it may help in making progress with apparently intractable mental health problems to assume that they will respond to simple, practical approaches. In this, both developments were in tune with the zeitgeist of the time. Interestingly, this common element of optimistic simplification was not dependent on whether or not developments were framed within the medical model, as that was assumed for psychiatric rehabilitation but not for behaviour therapy.