Sunday, November 09, 2003
Exploring spirituality's connection to community, coping ability
DOES participation in a church, synagogue or mosque create a sense of spirituality, or does a sense of spirituality motivate people to join religious communities?
Ralph Piedmont, director of research in the pastoral counseling program of Loyola College in Maryland, believes he knows the answer to the question -- one that explains why so many people who have left organized religion continue to look for spiritual fulfillment.
"Spirituality leads to involvement in community, not the other way around," he said.
Piedmont, trained in personality psychology and motivation, considers spirituality a fundamental component of one's makeup, as much as other characteristics psychologists usually measure when developing personality profiles: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
During the last six years, Piedmont has devised a Spiritual Transcendence Scale, beginning with a long form of 24 questions and recently adding a short form of nine. His goal was to create a scientific measure of spirituality -- a tool that could be used, among other things, to determine how well a chronically ill person or a recovering substance abuser might respond to treatment.
His thesis was simple: A person who is highly developed spiritually is more likely to have a positive outlook than someone with low spirituality and thus will be better equipped to cope with the emotional and physical pain of illness or trauma.
He asks respondents, among other things, to indicate whether they find a "sense of wholeness" in meditation or prayer, feel a "bond with all humanity" or believe that dead relatives or friends influence their life decisions.
"The whole (point) is to look at spirituality that cuts across denominations, to look at what is common to all faiths," he said. "It's the notion that spirituality translates into a motivational variable, something that drives people to create meaning in life."
Genetics, along with environment and life experiences, plays a role in how spiritual a person is or will become, Piedmont said. People with little spiritual development think of themselves as self-reliant, with little need for help from friends, a community of like-thinking people or a supernatural force or being. They focus on day-to-day existence and can be self-centered, often narcissistic, he said.
People with highly developed spiritualities "understand the broader sense of community. There's a certain sense of selflessness," he said. They rely on others for support and might also express devotion to God or other spiritual beings.
The sense of connectedness with other people and the world at large is one of the strongest indicators of spiritual maturity, Piedmont said.
Typically, women score higher than men on the transcendence scale, and people older than 30 score higher than those younger, he said. Psychological studies have long shown women to be communal and relationship-oriented, while men have been shown to act more independently. The age factor relates to a tendency for members of the over-30 crowd to begin thinking more about their mortality, he said.
Susan Bartlett, a psychologist and assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found Piedmont's scale an accurate indicator of how 77 patients at Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center would cope while receiving treatment over a 12-month period in 1999 and 2000. All the study participants had rheumatoid arthritis, a "particularly devastating, debilitating disease with no cure" and ranged in age from 30 to over 70, Bartlett said.
The severity and progression of the disease is no indicator of how patients react emotionally to their illness, she said. Some with "objectively very little disease" go into severe depression and can't function, while some in advanced stages are happier and continue to do their work and other activities as best they can.
The Spiritual Transcendence Scale provided insight that previous indicators did not, Bartlett said. People high in spirituality tended to be happier, more energetic and more hopeful, she said.
Bartlett said numerous recent studies have shown that people whose lifestyle includes such religious behaviors as praying daily and attending a house of worship regularly tend to be healthier and have a more positive outlook on life, and illness, than those who don't.
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