Methods in Religion, Spirituality & Aging

James W. Ellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415995092
• eBook ISBN: 9781317994978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Since the 1971 White House Conference on Aging in the United States, the need to move from religiosity into new areas such as Spiritual Assessment and Spirituality has emerged. This movement has picked up momentum among scholars, particularly in terms of research in the area of Spirituality. While spirituality as a term is employed in many new studies, this term continues to defy the quest for a single definition and method. This book is divided into three sections. In the first the authors reflect on the philosophical and theological issues presented by these terms from a variety of both cognate and practical methodological approaches. The second section offers insights from the major professions of sociology, psychology, public health, nursing and social work. The final section offers insight and assistance to researchers and authors on specific religious traditions. This book will be important for anyone working to develop such practical tools as spiritual assessment forms to those who engage in more formal scholarly investigation.

PROFESSIONS

Psychology

The “Persistent Problems” in the Psychology of Religion and Aging: A View of the Past and a Look to the Future

Susan H. McFadden

In order to tell the story of the psychological study of religion and aging, I decided to return to a book that first captured my imagination 30 years ago. Written by phenomenological psychologist Robert B. MacLeod (1975), The Persistent Problems of Psychology provides conceptual continuity and clarity for considering psychology’s past and its promise for the future. MacLeod organized the book around five “puzzles” that have always challenged people who think about the nature and meaning of human life and experience. As conceived by MacLeod, psychology inherited these puzzles, or “persistent problems” from philosophy. They represent fundamental questions about (1) the relation between mind and body (metaphysics); (2) the origins of knowledge (epistemology); (3) the foundation of aesthetic judgment (aesthetics); (4) the motivation for individual behavior (ethics); and (5) the foundations of social organization and conduct (politics).

It seems appropriate to turn to MacLeod to structure a discussion of the history and future of the psychological study of religion and aging. Although to my knowledge, MacLeod never studied old age, he did take religion seriously and he regretted psychology’s lack of attention to religion in the 20th century. MacLeod also observed that those few psychologists who did study psychology either had extremely narrow views of religion (often seeing it only as a source of mental illness) or they employed the psychological study of religion to promote apologetic goals (as cited in Forrester, 1963).

More than a quarter century after MacLeod’s death, the psychology of religion has become a lively, empirically-sound, and theoretically sophisticated field. This is best exemplified in a recently published work, The Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (Paloutzian & Park, 2005a). In the 30 chapters in this handbook, authors present the latest thinking on a wide variety of topics including theoretical and methodological issues, developmental themes, connections to the basic psychology subdisciplines, and applications of the psychology of religion in clinical and counseling psychology.

This paper brings MacLeod’s reflections on the “persistent problems” of psychology into dialogue with the latest developments in the psychological study of religion. It poses the questions commonly asked about each of the “problems,” reviews current research relevant to these “problems,” and suggests how they might be addressed in the future. The paper also proposes an additional “persistent problem:” the existential problem which focuses on the experience of meaning in life. Throughout, this paper recognizes the need for psychologists to build bridges between research and practice. Therefore, as much as possible, it presents ideas on how the “persistent problems” can be addressed by researchers and by practitioners working in religious and secular settings with the so-called well elderly, as well as frail persons and those with dementia.

THE METAPHYSICAL PROBLEM

For much of its early history, psychology embraced Descartes’ resolution of the ancient question about the relation of mind and body by viewing them as separate, with the machine-like human body interacting with an incorporeal spirit that activated behavior and in turn, could be affected by the body’s response to physical stimuli. Today, psychology is strongly influenced by research conducted over the past two decades that has revealed the neurophysiological underpinnings of thinking, feeling, and acting. We can now “see” into the active, responsive brain through neuro-imaging techniques and even those highest of spiritual achievements like a mystical sense of unification with the divine are viewed as reflections of brain activity (Newberg & Newberg, 2005). However, before assuming that the case is closed on the metaphysical problem because of advances in neuroscience, it is instructive to pay attention to lively discussions occurring in theological circles that offer alternatives to the now discarded Cartesian dualism and the apparent reductive materialism of neurophysiological models. One such position has been described by theologian Nancey Murphy (1998) and others as “nonreductive physicalism”; they argue that theology can engage with science without reducing the divine to natural phenomena.

No studies so far have asked old people to have their brains imaged while they meditate, pray, or listen to religious music or a sermon. However, as Jeff Levin notes (2008), considerable research has documented the salutary effects of religious beliefs and practices on older people’s physical health, rates of morbidity/mortality, and psychological well-being. One reason for this may be due to the ways religious emotions affect the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems. These emotions are evoked through private religious acts of prayer and meditation or in corporate worship and may account for the many findings about the connections between religion and older people’s health (McFadden & Levin, 1996). Robert Emmons (2005) has written that efforts to explain the mechanisms behind the religion and health connections summarized by Levin are fueling efforts to understand more about specific religious emotions like gratitude, awe and reverence, wonder, and hope. Unfortunately, work on religious emotions has not tended to include older adults even though there is a burgeoning literature on the valence (positive vs. negative affect), intensity, and complexity of emotion in later life (e.g., Isaacowitz & Smith, 2003; Kunzmann & Grühn, 2005; Mroczek, 2001).

In addition to the direct effects of religious emotions on physical health, religious beliefs and practices also offer many resources for regulating emotion and coping with difficult circumstances which themselves can positively influence health. We have long known that older adults rely on various religious coping mechanisms (Koenig, George, & Siegler, 1988; Pargament & Ano, 2004) and that the support they receive from people in their faith communities is associated with better health outcomes than experienced by elders who have no ties to faith communities (Krause, 2002).

The evidence on community-supported religious coping and health challenges the traditional view of Western metaphysics that considers the mind/body relationship alone, without setting it within the context of social connectedness. Indeed, the vast literature on social support and older people’s health, with the corollary findings about health and support within faith communities, points to the fundamental human need for relatedness or belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The human mind is enabled by a brain that is responding to physical signals generated by conditions within the body as well as by interactions with other persons and the environment. The religious person would add that the mind is also enabled by the brain in interaction with the sacred.

This metaphysics of relatedness comes into vivid relief when considering the lives of frail people with dementia. Can they still experience the positive physical effects of religious practices described in so many research findings? In all likelihood, the individual with dementia struggle to exercise agency in order to actively engage in either private or public religious acts. Personhood in dementia is relational (Kitwood, 1997), and one can even say that mind in dementia is relational. Thus, the person with dementia requires the accompaniment of other people to activate religious emotions, provide opportunities for prayer and meditation, and create an experience of worship. Many have documented the positive affective responses of religious elders with dementia when they are participating in religious activities. A recent study suggested that they can be taught to meditate and that this can have positive outcomes on health (Lindberg, 2005). This is a topic begging for research alliances between psychologists and clergy, chaplains and others who care about the spiritual lives of frail elders.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM

In psychology, there are two types of questions related to the epistemological problem. One set inquires about the sources of knowledge and whether human beings gain knowledge by being genetically predisposed to acquire certain knowledge structures, and/or by interacting with the world through psychological processes like attention, sensation and perception, memory, and imagination. The second type of question is methodological, referring to various positions on obtaining knowledge through the design and conduct of psychological inquiry.

As anyone knows from reading the newspapers these days, religious beliefs can profoundly affect knowledge about the natural world and social relations. Research has shown that religious beliefs also affect attention and perception; people with different kinds of beliefs (or no beliefs) selectively attend to different type of stimuli. This selective attention affects memory by screening out information that cannot then be coded into long term memory. Turning to another level of cognition, a major function of religion is to guide people’s judgment, decision making, and problem solving. All of these are standard topics addressed by cognitive psychologists, although few analyze the religious components of cognitive processes. A rapidly growing area of interest to psychologists falls under the rubric of “social cognition” and here, too, we can observe many influences of religion on how people perceive one another, make decisions on causes of others’ behaviors, and resolve the dissonance that arises when religious beliefs collide with other religious beliefs, or with various cultural conditions and practices (Ozorak, 2005).

Not surprisingly, many cognitive psychologists study aging and older adults. However, very few examine how religious faith shapes the ways older people acquire, process and retain information, make decisions, solve problems, employ higher order thinking that often is called “wisdom”, or even how they recall and reconstruct the stories of their lives through autobiographical memory. Clearly, this is yet another area that is wide open for the formulation and testing of good research questions. In addition, cognitive psychologists who study people with dementia might pay attention to the proliferation of anecdotal evidence about how old, religious people with dementing illnesses can recall so clearly words of hymns and liturgies as well as the behaviors associated with religious rituals.

Investigation of these questions about religion and knowing in later life requires appropriate methods, the second component of the epistemological problem. As Jeff Levin notes in “Religion, Aging, and Health: Historical Perspectives, Current Trends, and Future Directions” (2008), research on religion and aging has come a long way since its early days. Investigators now employ multidimensional measures of religiousness and powerful new statistical analyses to address the complexities of predicting various behavioral and health outcomes from variables like organized religious participation, private religious activities, and the subjective evaluation of religiousness and/or spirituality. The robust research now being produced by cognitive psychologists often relies on experiments, a form of research rarely found in investigations of religion and aging. The future is wide open for researchers to begin to employ experimental designs to understand how religion shapes late life cognition and vice versa. In addition, sophisticated new approaches to narrative analysis should be used to address the ways older people’s religiousness affects the ways they perceive and think about themselves, other people, and the world at large.

THE AESTHETIC PROBLEM

Despite the fact that experiencing and participating in the arts are among humanity’s most enduring and meaningful activities, psychologists have been woefully reluctant to engage with the aesthetic problem and to examine the questions it poses about the perception and evaluation of beauty. This is due in part to the discipline’s early roots in German psychophysics and physiology which shaped its determination to adhere to strict standards of scientific rigor. Thus, the arts, which are capable both of eliciting profound transcendent joy and also of exposing the heart of darkness in individuals and cultures, have largely been ignored by psychologists in general and more specifically, by those who study religion and aging. This situation is beginning to change; increasingly, the “persistent problem” of what influences people’s perceptions and evaluations of beauty is working its way into more mainstream psychology. For example, in 2007, the American Psychological Association announced that it will publish a new journal, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. The same year, The Gerontological Society of America began Publishing the Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts.

In psychological studies of aging, very little attention is paid to the arts. Studies of creativity mostly focus on whether creativity in art, literature, and science increases or decreases with age; they have not examined how opportunities for creative expression affect health and well-being. For example, out of the last 4 editions of the Handbook...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• REFLECTIONS
• PROFESSIONS
• Index