Psychology of Religion and Lived Religion Practice Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the Psychology of Religion and Lived Religion lecture notes from Classes 5 through 10, based on key texts by James, Granqvist, Murphy, Park, Rizzuto, Schaap-Jonker, McClure, and Wulf.

Religion (William James)

The feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

Institutional Religion

A branch of religion focusing on worship, sacrifice, theology, ceremony, and ecclesiastical organization to win the favor of the gods.

Personal Religion

Religion focusing on the inner dispositions of man himself, including conscience, desert, helplessness, and incompleteness, which James considers more fundamental than institutional forms.

Solemnity

A defining characteristic of religious feeling for William James, described as a serious and tender quality that contrasts with mockery or indifference.

Unseen Order

The religious belief that there is a hidden arrangement of reality and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves to it.

Lived Religion

The way a person creates, thinks of, and practices their own way of being religious, which is not strictly hindered by the prescriptions of a specific tradition.

Subjective Religious Consciousness

The field of experience that Ernst Troeltsch argued is the only way to scientifically approach religion following the destruction of strict dogmatic belief.

Numinous Experiences

One of the three factors identified by Yaden and Newberg in a study of $4000$ people, specifically regarding experiences of God.

Safe Haven

An attachment figure sought out for comfort and protection when an individual is distressed.

Secure Base

An attachment figure whose availability supports confident exploration; as Bowlby noted, such confidence makes a person less prone to chronic fear.

Stronger and Wiser

The appraisal of an attachment figure as more capable than the attached individual; for God, this is maximized through omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.

Noncorporeal Attachment Figure

Pehr Granqvist's term for God as an attachment figure who is invisible and has unverifiable responsiveness, yet shares a family resemblance to the infant-caregiver prototype.

Family Resemblances

Wittgenstein's concept for categories whose members share overlapping similarities without a single defining essence, applied by Granqvist to the concept of attachment.

Correspondence Hypothesis

The theory that Internal Working Models (IWMs) from interpersonal experiences generalize to God-representations, where positive IWMs lead to a benevolent God-image.

Compensation Hypothesis

The theory that religious experiences may be used to substitute for a lack of attachment security in close human relationships.

Hyperactivation

A state of attachment-related anxiety where a person worries that others will not be supportive and anxiously seeks their love.

Deactivation

A state of attachment-related avoidance where a person distrusts others' intentions and defensively strives for emotional independence.

Ontological Agnosticism

Granqvist's stance of bracketing the actual existence of God to focus solely on the psychological functioning of the perceived relationship.

Meaning Systems Approach

A theoretical framework treating meaning-making as a fundamental process underlying both religious and non-religious worldviews.

Global Meaning

The core schemas people use to interpret their experiences, comprising beliefs, goals, and a subjective sense of purpose.

Situational Meaning

The meaning created when global meaning systems are applied to interpret specific instances and their significance.

Emic vs. Etic

Emic refers to categories meaningful within a culture; etic refers to analytically valid categories across cultures; Murphy argues the religion/spirituality distinction is emic.

Implicit Religion

Edward Bailey's concept capturing how secular beliefs, objects, or values function psychologically in ways similar to religious ones.

Quasi-religions

Ninian Smith's term for worldviews like Humanism or Nationalism that offer implicit soteriologies despite not being classified as formal religions.

Existential Cultures

Murphy's term for worldviews (religious or secular) that represent idiosyncratic attempts to construct functional models of the world.

Meaning-making Coping

Efforts to reduce discrepancies between a stressful situation's appraised meaning and global meaning, either through assimilation or accommodation.

Meaning Made

The product of meaning-making which involves revised situational appraisals or changes in global meaning, such as a revised identity or growth.

Stress-related Growth

Positive changes people report as a result of stressful encounters, also known as posttraumatic growth or benefit-finding.

Negative Religious Coping

Coping that involves questioning God's control or existence in response to stress or illness.

Object Relations Theory (ORT)

The study of the development of internal, mental representations of self, important others, and the affective relational components between them.

God Representation

An idiosyncratic and highly personalized internal image of God derived from a person's object relations, self-representations, and environmental beliefs.

God Image vs. God Concept

God images are relational, emotional, and initially subconscious working models; God concepts are explicit, cognitive sets of beliefs learned through socialization.

Genetic Point of View

In Rizzuto's framework, this refers to the developmental process of maturing the capacity to represent a nonexperiential object sensorially.

De-repression

The process Rizzuto uses to explain conversion, where an emotional experience triggers the release of an earlier God-representation's components.

Person-oriented Approach

A methodological approach focusing on identifying subgroups of individuals who share comparable scoring patterns across multiple variables simultaneously.

Questionnaire of God Representations (QGR)

A $33$-item instrument measuring feelings toward God (Positive, Anger, Anxiety) and perceptions of God's actions (Supportive, Ruling/Punishing, Passivity).

Positive-Authoritative Type

A God-representation profile combining high positive feelings and supportive actions with meaningfully high ruling/punishing perceptions that carry a protective connotation.

Passive-Unemotional Type

A God-representation profile characterized by low emotional engagement and high scores on the Passivity scale, suggesting God does not act.

Negative-Authoritarian Type

A profile found only in psychiatric patients in the Schaap-Jonker study, combining high anxiety and anger with threatening perceptions of God's ruling/punishing actions.

Passivity (QGR Scale)

A scale measuring the perception that God 'lets everything take its course' and does not intervene.

Psychological Construction (of Emotions)

The model suggesting individuals construct emotions in the moment based on core affect, context, memory, and social goals.

Polis

The early Greek term for a life-giving social system, which Aristotle considered a necessary precondition for eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia

A Greek concept often translated as 'happiness' or 'flourishing,' defined by Aristotle as an activity of the soul in accord with excellence.

Apatheia

The Stoic ideal of achieving inner peace through freedom from the passions.

Flourishing

A state broader than subjective happiness that includes dignity, joy, resilience, and participation in creating what is good for the whole.

The Unconditional

Drawing on John Caputo, that which is without reason or purpose and simply 'is,' inviting the material world toward self-realization.

Wisdom (Phronesis)

The ability to make theoretical and practical distinctions to see beyond appearances and understand situations with nuance.

Micro-trauma

Injuries 'hidden in plain sight' caused by repetitive, interactive events within essential relationships rather than single catastrophic events.

Slow Poison

Mariéle Wulf's metaphor for traumatizing relationships that slowly kill the soul of the affected person over time.

Dignity (Wulf)

The apex of emotional and moral orientation, described as an inalienable 'divine spark' that is often the target of relational trauma.

The Three Promises of Love

Wulf's framework for healing trauma: (1) Confirming Existence, (2) Appreciating Individuality, and (3) Warranting Trustworthiness.

Double-bind Relationship

A malignant relationship dynamic where a victim is forced to hold two contradictory viewpoints from which no escape is possible.

Moral Injury

The psychological and spiritual harm resulting from the betrayal of core values like justice, fairness, or loyalty.