Spirituality is an important, but oft-overlooked, aspect of the self that may affect college students’ wellbeing and belonging. Few studies have systematically examined closeness to God and spiritual struggles as predictors of college student wellbeing during early college, which is a critical window for identity development. Moreover, research exploring interactions between spiritual struggles and closeness to God in predicting wellbeing outcomes is scarce. We address these gaps in the literature with an analytic sample comprised of 839 first-year college participants who (...) identify as religious. The results of correlational analyses and linear mixed effect models are presented. Closeness to God was associated with greater wellbeing and belonging, and spiritual struggles were associated with lower wellbeing and belonging. In exploratory analyses, a moderating effect of closeness to God on the relation between spiritual struggles and negative outcomes was observed. Implications for higher education and college student development are discussed. (shrink)

We present evidence for a complex relationship between religiousness and Haidt’s moral foundations, with data from four experiments, measuring 21 different dimensions of personal religiousness and utilizing six different religious primes. The more conservative dimensions of religiousness, such as intrinsic religious orientation and religious attendance, were positively related to binding moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity and sometimes related to the individualizing foundation of care. However, other, less conservative dimensions of religiousness, such as quest and extrinsic religious orientations, were (...) unrelated or negatively related to binding foundations. Benevolent God concept was the only religious measure that was positively related to all five moral foundations. We did not find reliable effects of religious primes on endorsement of moral foundations. Results suggest a consistent but complicated relationship between religiousness and moral foundations at a dispositional level. (shrink)

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific understanding. This study adds to the current literature by testing the effects of purely audial religious symbols (instrumental music) on moral behavior across three different sites: Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and the USA. Participants were exposed to one (...) of three kinds of auditory stimuli (religious, secular, or white noise), and subsequently were given a chance to dishonestly report on solved mathematical equations in order to increase their monetary reward. The results showed cross-cultural differences in the effects of religious music on moral behavior, as well as a significant interaction between condition and religiosity across all sites, suggesting that religious participants were more influenced by the auditory religious stimuli than non-religious participants. We propose that religious music can function as a subtle cue associated with moral standards via cultural socialization and ritual participation. Such associative learning can charge music with specific meanings and create sacred cues that influence normative behavior. Our findings provide preliminary support for this view, which we hope further research will investigate more closely. (shrink)

Lee and Schwarz interpret meta-analytic research and replication studies as providing evidence for the robustness of cleansing effects. We argue that the currently available evidence is unconvincing because publication bias and the opportunistic use of researcher degrees of freedom appear to have inflated meta-analytic effect size estimates, and preregistered replications failed to find any evidence of cleansing effects.