Personality and Social Psychology Approaches to Religious and Spiritual Development in Adolescents

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-020-00144-z NARRATIVE REVIEW

Personality and Social Psychology Approaches to Religious and Spiritual Development in Adolescents

Sarah A. Schnitker¹ · Emily G. Williams¹ · Jay M. Medenwaldt¹

Received: 24 June 2020 / Accepted: 23 November 2020 / Published online: 2 January 2021

Abstract

The fields of personality and social psychology, with their focus on individual differences and human communalities, have much to offer the study of religious and spiritual development in adolescence. This review describes the ways McAdams and Pals’ comprehensive personality theory and Saroglou’s Big Four functional account of religion inform the scientific understanding of adolescents’ religious and spiritual development. These theories suggest religious/spiritual development of adolescents should be studied at three levels of personality (traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity/objective biography) and account for the potential functions of religion in relation to behaving (moral), believing (cognitive), belonging (social), and bonding (emotional) across diverse cultural contexts. The utility of these theories for investigating adolescent religious/spiritual development is illustrated through description of empirical studies and lines of research based on methodologies commonly employed in personality and social psychology, including longitudinal studies, religious priming experiments, and experience sampling methods. Likewise, this review highlights areas for future investigation and provides specific suggestions for inquiry on adolescent religious/spiritual development, which include deploying experimental designs, merging narrative identity with identity status approaches, and adopting a more holistic view of traits through analysis of experience sampling data.

Keywords Religiosity · Spirituality · Adolescence · Development · Personality · Social psychology

Introduction

Personality and social psychology have much to offer in studying the religious and spiritual development of adolescents. Many researchers consider adolescence a sensi- tive period for religious and spiritual development because adolescents’ increasing aptitudes for hypothetical reasoning, abstract thought, and meta-cognition allow for meaningful engagement with religious and spiritual concepts (Good and Willoughby 2008). Moreover, researchers suggest adolescence is the period of life during which people are more likely to experience religious and spiritual changes (Reg- nerus and Uecker 2006), which set the trajectory for inte- gration of religiosity and spirituality into adult personality.

Studying the ways religiosity and spirituality are connected with personality and social psychology theory and research

during this time of identity formation and increased engagement with peers (Nickerson and Nagle 2005; Ragelienė 2016) is informative for understanding basic processes and tracking the origins of life course trajectories. This review describes the ways McAdams and Pals’ (2006) comprehensive personality theory and Saroglou’s (2011) Big Four functional account of religion inform the scientific understanding of adolescents’ religious and spiritual development based on methodologies commonly employed in personality and social psychology, including longitudinal studies, religious priming experiments, and experience sampling methods.

Comprehensive Personality Theories Propose Multiple Levels of Analysis

Personality science is intended to provide an integrative framework for understanding the whole person. As classi- cally described by Kluckhohn and Murray (1953), personality theories reveal how each individual is (a) like all other persons, (b) like some other persons, and (c) like no other persons. Personality psychology tends to focus on the latter

* Sarah A. Schnitker sarah_schnitker@baylor.edu

1 Psychology and Neuroscience, Baylor University, One Bear Place 97334, Waco, TX 76798, USA

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two aims of understanding individual differences whereas social psychology focuses on the first component of this mis- sion—understanding human communalities and situational influences. Together the two disciplines illuminate the dis- tinctively human process of religious/spiritual development during adolescence.

Although a variety of comprehensive personality theories are in existence, theories have converged over the past two decades to similarly focus on personality as presenting at multiple levels of analysis. Starting with McAdams and Pals (2006) and followed by trait theorists such as McCrae and Costa (2008), personality theorists posit that personality is best conceptualized as the dynamic interactions between evolved biology, the external culture/environment, and three levels of personality. The three levels are dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life narrative (or objective biography).

Dispositional traits, the level of personality most commonly identified and assessed, are the basic tendencies people have related to extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness that are relatively stable across adulthood and most closely tied to biological bases of behavior (Terracciano et al. 2010). Less commonly studied, characteristic adaptations are related to daily behaviors and include constructs such as goals, motives, defense mechanisms, and schemas. Whereas traits refer to what personality

“is” or “has,” characteristic adaptations describe what personality “does” (Cantor 1990). They “spell out many of the details of psychological individuality as contextualized in time, situations, and social roles” in order to “meet situation, strategic, and developmental tasks in the social ecology of a person’s life” (McAdams and Pals 2006, p. 213). Finally, integrative life narratives, or objective biographies, encom- pass the particular stories people tell about their lives to make meaning of their identity in light of salient life events (McAdams and McLean 2013).

Research at these levels of personality is important because each level provides unique information for understanding the plethora of ways that developing adolescents engage religiosity and spirituality across diverse cultural contexts and situations. Culture has modest effects on dispositional traits, strong influences on characteristic adaptations, and profound effects on narrative identities (McAdams and Pals 2006). Given that religion is an inherently cultural construct (Cohen 2009), observation of personality levels more closely associated with culture is indispensable.

Functional Account of Religion with Saroglou’s Four Bs

As demonstrated in discussion of the influence of culture on characteristic adaptations and narrative identity, comprehensive accounts of personality recognize that culture greatly

influences the development and expression of personality—including religiosity and spirituality. Likewise, social psychologists are highly attuned to situational and social influences on cognitions, emotions, and behaviors and have pushed personality theories to integrate situationist explanations (Fleeson 2004). Given the myriad ways culture is fun- damental in religiosity/spirituality (Cohen 2009), an organizing framework is needed to understand the functions of religion that allows for specification of universal and specific processes across diverse sociocultural contexts. Saroglou’s Big Four Theory (2011) for religion provides such a framework by postulating four main functions of religions that may or may not arise in diverse cultures: behaving (moral), believing (cognitive), belonging (social), and bonding (emotional). These four functions point to different mechanisms for explaining diverse associations between religion and well-being—whether positive or negative. The functions offer explanations for how and why people are religious as well as why they join or exit religion.

Bonding, the first dimension of Saroglou’s (2011) theory, is primarily concerned with the emotions that people feel related to religious/spiritual experiences, ranging from positive emotions like awe or wonder to negative emotions like fear or guilt. These emotions bond the person to with a deity, transcendent truth, community/people, and/or their inner self (Saroglou 2011). This dimension is mainly experiential with a focus on rituals and is primarily correlated with emotional well-being outcomes. Next, the believing dimension, as its name would suggest, comprises the religious and spiritual beliefs people hold, ranging from literal to symbolic. Prin- cipally focused on intellectual and cognitive elements of religion, this dimension is related to outcomes like purpose or meaning in life. In contrast, the belonging dimension references the social functions of religion—the ways religion fulfills humans’ need to belong. Chiefly focused on group membership and social participation, belonging affects health outcomes, social support, and esteem; it ranges from more exclusive to inclusive. Finally, the behaving dimension entails adherence to the moral norms of religions, which may range from more self- versus other-focused. Outcomes for behaving relate to self-control and other prosocial or vir- tuous behaviors.

This framework for understanding the functions of religions is useful for parsing various recurrent forms or expres- sions of religion observed across cultures. Saroglou (2011) argues that most religious or cultural groups tend to emphasize two out of the four dimensions such that certain types or forms of religion regularly recur in the following categories: charismatic communities might be viewed as a form of religion that emphasizes bonding and belonging; intrinsic religiosity is a form of religion that emphasizes believing and behaving; spirituality (as ascribed by people who call themselves spiritual but not religious) mostly encompasses

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believing and bonding; asceticism emphasizes bonding and behaving; moral communities focus on behaving and belonging; and orthodox religious groups focus on believing and belonging.

Methodological Approaches

In addition to these guiding theories, there are several common methods in personality and social psychology worth highlighting for the study of religiosity/spirituality in adolescents. First, personality psychologists embrace shorter term (e.g., spanning months or a year) and longer term (e.g., spanning years or decades) longitudinal research designs to study the processes of religious and spiritual development.

By observing change across time and using sophisticated analytic approaches to map trajectories and bidirectionality of change, many new insights have been made possible in reference to adolescent religious/spiritual development in the general population (e.g., Huuskes et al. 2013) as well as in particular religious contexts (e.g., evangelical religious summer camps; Schnitker et al. 2014a). Given the complexi- ties of religiosity and spirituality, it is often impossible to experimentally manipulate religious variables (e.g., you cannot randomly assign someone to experience a religious conversion), so examining change across time allows for observation of directionality of effects even though inferences about causation may not be possible. Moreover, tracking participants across substantial amounts of time is the best way to uncover developmental processes as they play out in adolescence as well as typical trajectories of change.

Second, social psychologists tend to use experimental methods with double-blind random assignment. With religiosity, this has most commonly taken the form of priming religious concepts with a variety of stimuli ranging from explicit (e.g., reading religious texts, taking questionnaires about religious beliefs) to implicit (e.g., sentence-unscram- bling task with religious words) to subliminal (e.g., religious words quickly flashed on screen such that stimuli are supraliminally perceived but not recognized) to contextual (e.g., tested inside religious buildings; Shariff et al. 2016).

Experimental studies using religious primes are useful in that they allow for tests of causal inferences (e.g., religion causes increases in prosociality), but there are controversies around replicability and meaning of religious primes (van Elk et al. 2015). Moreover, experimental studies of religion tend to suffer from generalizability concerns given that they are typically conducted on non-representative samples in the laboratory when cultural contexts of religion can vary widely. Despite these limitations, well-executed experimental designs are quite powerful for establishing causality and isolating mechanisms that predict changes.

Finally, both personality and social psychologists commonly deploy experience sampling methodology to

understand the complex dynamics of human affect, cognition, and behavior in social contexts. Experience sampling methodology protocols involve soliciting feedback from participants at multiple occasions throughout daily life (e.g., ranging from hourly to daily) in order to examine the fluctuations and stability of constructs across time. Whereas longitudinal studies tend to examine mean-level changes or profiles of change across longer periods to time to establish developmental trends, experience sampling methods tend to focus on intraindividual fluctuations over shorter periods of time that explain the processes of within-person change.

Several studies have now examined spirituality with experience sampling methods (Hardy et al. 2014; Kashdan and Nezlek 2012; Tong 2017).

Trait Research on Adolescent Religious/

Spiritual Development

There are two main streams of research on personality traits relevant to religious and spiritual development in adolescence: (a) studies that examine the relations between longitudinal changes in Big Five personality traits and religiosity and (b) studies that examine spirituality as a distinct trait.

Longitudinal Relations Between Religiosity and Big Five Traits

About a half dozen studies have examined how changes in personality traits and religiosity starting in adolescence covary across multiple measurement occasions into adulthood (e.g., Heaven and Ciarrocchi 2007; Huuskes et al.

2013; McCullough et al. 2003; Wink et al. 2007). Notably, these studies are focused on assessing the directionality of effects between traits and religiosity/spirituality (typically using cross-lagged modeling approaches) in contrast to developmental psychology studies (e.g., Goodman and Dyer 2020; Kliewer et al. 2020; Wright et al. 2018) that seek to capture person-centered patterns of growth and decline in relation to relevant predictors or outcomes (typically using growth curve modeling approaches). Thus, for personality and social psychology, the primary research question probes whether religiosity and spirituality influence subsequent traits, traits influence subsequent religiosity and spirituality, or effects are bidirectional.

Several studies demonstrate personality traits predict subsequent mean levels of religiosity, consistently showing that higher or increasing conscientiousness in adolescence predicts higher or increasing religiousness at subsequent measurement occasions later in adolescence or in adulthood (Heaven and Ciarrocchi 2007; McCullough et al.

2003; Wink et al. 2007). This pattern of results suggest religion affords a characteristic mode of expressing basic

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tendencies; conscientious adolescents might be attracted to religion because it aligns well with their basic personality.

In contrast, several studies found that religiosity predicts subsequent levels of traits or bidirectional effects, which suggests that religious socialization also shapes personality—namely agreeableness. Religious values predicted a subsequent increase in agreeableness and decrease in psychoticism in one study (Huuskes et al. 2013), and bidirectional associations were found between agreeableness and religiosity from adolescence to late life in female participants (Wink et al. 2007). Thus, there is some support that religiosity helps socialize adolescents such that they become more agreeable through adulthood and that agreeable adolescents are also more likely to further engage religiosity into adulthood.

Although there does seem to be some convergence among longitudinal studies examining Big Five traits and religiosity from adolescence to adulthood, it is important to recognize that these findings may be dependent on cultural context. A socio-cultural motives perspective on Big Five traits suggest that agreeableness and conscientiousness stimulate assimilation to socio-cultural norms such that they will more strongly correlate with religiosity in cultural contexts where religiosity is normative, which was demonstrated with data from 66 countries and over three million participants (Gebauer et al. 2014). Studies have not yet tested the socio-cultural motives perspective for religiosity’s positive associations with agreeableness and conscientiousness in adolescents, but it is likely findings would be consistent with those from adult data.

Researchers have also explored the moderating effect of personality traits on stability and change in religiosity.

In particular, higher levels of trait neuroticism (e.g., emotional instability) predicted greater stability in levels of religiosity from adolescence to young adulthood such that there was 32% shared variance between religious upbring- ing and religiosity in young adulthood for those one standard deviation above the mean on neuroticism, in contrast to 10% shared variance for participants one standard deviation below the mean (McCullough et al. 2003). Although further exploration is necessary to replicate and explain this effect, the researchers suggest emotionally unstable adolescents might use religious structures as a way of coping with adversity and maintaining inner harmony. Alter- natively, adolescents higher in neuroticism might retain the religious faith of their parents to avoid the emotional turmoil that could arise from family conflict related to religion (whereas more emotionally stable adolescents might experience less negative emotionality in conflict).

Spirituality as a Trait

Rather than thinking about religion as an expression of Big Five traits or as a socialization mechanism in personality development, some researchers have focused on spirituality or spiritual transcendence as a personality trait itself. Origi- nating in the premise that spiritual transcendence represents a sixth factor of adult personality (Piedmont 1999), numerous scholars have attempted to measure some type of trait spirituality in adolescents across cultural contexts. Rather than relying on specific beliefs or practices associated with organized religion, spirituality constructs focus on the extent to which youth feel a sense of transcendence or connection to something beyond the self. Constructing a measure that is reliable and valid across diverse contexts is challenging because vocabulary/language for describing this type of trait spirituality tends to be idiosyncratic to particular faith traditions and cultural groups even in the presence of global themes (King et al. 2014). However, recent work is prom- ising in terms of finding language that can be used across contexts. For example, the Measure of Diverse Adolescent Spirituality, which has been validated with adolescents from the USA, Mexico, and El Salvador (King et al. 2017, 2019), relies on a conceptualization of adolescent spirituality as inclusive of transcendence, fidelity, and contribution. Addi- tional global data of this kind are needed to demonstrate the universality of spirituality as a robust personality factor akin to the Big Five.

Characteristic Adaptations Research and Adolescent Religious/Spiritual Development

Although personality traits have long been the primary focus of inquiry in personality psychology, research on characteristic adaptations is burgeoning in recent years. Character- istic adaptations capture the diverse ways people typically interact with their environments, so there are many potential connections between religiosity and personality development at this level. Using Saroglou’s (2011) Big Four functions of religion as an orienting framework, research studies highlight ways characteristic adaptations related to bonding, believing, belonging, and behaving affect adolescent development. Although Saroglou’s (2011) framework was primarily designed with adult populations in mind, it is a useful theory for organizing research on adolescent religious and spiritual development. Indeed, characteristic adaptations related to these four functions operate in theoretically hypothesized ways among adolescents: they explain associations between religion and well-being, describe how and why people are religious, and illuminate why people join or exit religions.

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Characteristic Adaptations for Bonding Through Religion

The bonding function of religion describes the ways people experience emotional connections with transcendent objects—which can include spiritual forces, gods, God, or saints. Research with adolescents has mainly focused on (a) emotional well-being in relation to religious experience and (b) attachment to God.

Emotions and Religious Experience in Adolescents

Numerous research studies have demonstrated positive connections between religiosity/spirituality and physical/psychological well-being after controlling for other important health predictors such as social support, education, or eth- nicity (Koenig 2012), but fewer studies explicate potential psychological mediators of these associations. One of the most compelling explanations is that religion and spirituality activate positive emotions that are related to self-transcendence, such as awe, love, gratitude, and peace, which then facilitate global well-being (van Cappellen et al. 2016).

Limited research has addressed the processes by which religion might activate self-transcendent positive emotions to facilitate well-being during adolescence, but initial studies suggest this line of inquiry has strong potential. In a study of adolescents attending evangelistic religious summer camps in the United States, researchers found participants who reported a “mountain-top” religious transformation/conversion type experience at the end of camp demonstrated increases in intrapsychic functioning (i.e., lower depressive symptoms and loneliness; higher life satisfaction, self- esteem, and vitality) from pre-camp to 1 year post-camp (Schnitker et al. 2014a). Interestingly, other indices of religious change did not predict increases in intrapsychic functioning, which suggests self-transcendent positive emotions during the camp conversion were an essential factor for well- being change.

Attachment to God

Though research on the trajectories of change in response to adolescents’ spiritual struggles is sparse, an area of inquiry that has received considerable attention is understanding the attachment relationships people may form with God. Build- ing on adult attachment theory, which maintains children’s internal working models for their attachment relationships transfer from parents to romantic partners during adolescence, personality psychologists maintain adolescents may also form attachment relationships with God (Granqvist et al. 2020). In many ways, God (or some other type of religious entity) may be an ideal attachment figure who is well-suited to replace parents as a primary attachment figure

during adolescence and adulthood—perhaps even more so than romantic partners (Kirkpatrick 2005). God’s perceived supernatural powers are similar to beliefs very young children have about their parents’ abilities that become differen- tiated through age and experiences (Richert et al. 2017), and many conceptions of God—especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition—emphasize God’s role as a parental figure who is a source of safety and security during stress (Kirkpatrick 2005).

Although there is considerable consensus among researchers that many people use God as an attachment figure, there is less consonance regarding how levels of insecure-anxiety or insecure-avoidance internal working models of parental relationships from childhood translate to internal working models about God adopted in adolescence and adulthood (Kirkpatrick and Shaver 1992). The Correspond- ence Hypothesis posits that adolescents reference parental attachments to build similar internal working models for God. The Compensation Hypothesis holds that people will build a secure internal working model in their relationship with God that offsets their poor human attachments and provides a secure base. The two hypotheses are not necessarily competing at a population level; evidence for both can be found within and across studies, though evidence is more robust for correspondence (Granqvist et al. 2020).

The two hypotheses propose distinct developmental trajectories for religious and spiritual development across adolescence and into adulthood based upon childhood attachment security-insecurity and familial religiosity (Granqvist and Kirkpatrick 2004). The Correspondence Hypothesis predicts that people with secure parental attachments will experience gradual transformations of steadily increasing or decreasing religiosity/spirituality in line with familial patterns. In contrast, the Compensation Hypothesis predicts that adolescents with insecure attachments to their parents will be more likely to experience dramatic and sudden religious/

spiritual change that is preceded by emotional turmoil and crisis.

In a 15-month prospective study of 196 adolescents from Stockholm, Sweden, researchers corroborated both hypotheses by examining how qualitative and quantitative changes in religiosity/spirituality corresponded to changes in romantic relationships (Granqvist and Hagekull 2003). Supporting the Correspondence Hypothesis, adolescents with secure attachments were more likely to experience a gradual increase in religiosity/spirituality upon beginning a new romantic relationship and a gradual decrease in religiosity upon the dissolution of a romantic relationship. In contrast, insecurely attached adolescents were more likely to experience a dramatic and sudden increase in religiosity upon the dissolution of a romantic relationship and decrease in religiosity upon the initiation of a new romantic relationship, a pattern of results supporting the Compensation Hypothesis.

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Evidence supporting the Compensation Hypothesis is often more difficult to obtain as there are generally lower incidences of sudden and dramatic religious changes. For instance, the Correspondence Hypothesis was supported when researchers found adolescents with secure parental attachments were more likely to report a recommitment to God, or gradual religious change, at religious summer camps. However, parental attachments failed to predict the likelihood of adolescents reporting a new, dramatic commitment to their faith in the same sample (Schnitker et al. 2012), which was a test of the Compensation Hypothesis. Only 21 out of 138 participants reported such a dramatic conversion in the sample, so the null findings are best interpreted as a result of low power rather than disconfirming the hypothesis.

Many questions remain in understanding how characteristic adaptations related to the bonding functions of religion affect religious and spiritual development in adolescents.

Moreover, it is unknown whether the characteristic adaptations related to religiosity and spirituality among adolescents are quantitatively or qualitatively different than adults.

For example, does a compensatory attachment to God in adolescence, which likely compensates more for a parental attachment, differ from a compensatory attachment to God in adulthood, which likely compensates more for a romantic attachment? Do transcendent positive emotions have stronger or weaker effects on well-being compared to adults? Despite these questions, initial work proves investigation into the bonding functions of religion in adolescents promises several lines of constructive future investigation.

Characteristic Adaptations for Believing Through Religion

The believing aspect of religion generally pertains to the content and strength of religious beliefs. The content of the beliefs include whether people believe in God, gods, or other spiritual entities (e.g., angels, demons, chimeras, ghosts, ancestor spirits), the attributes they ascribe to these supernatural entities, and other transcendent beliefs related to morality or existential questions of meaning (Saroglou 2011). Measures of religious belief are usually encompassed within the broader construct of religiosity/spirituality, which includes aspects of belief and practice.

Disentangling Religious Belief

Although all four of Saroglou’s four Bs are interrelated, belonging, bonding, and behaving are all reciprocally related to religious belief in ways that can usually, but not always, be disentangled empirically (Galen 2012). For example, religious beliefs were highly correlated with behaviors (i.e., service involvement) among Seventh-day Adventist adolescents, but correlations were not so high as to collapse

the two constructs into a single domain (Nagy et al. 2017).

Likewise, another study, albeit with adults, found a moderate correlation between religious beliefs and behaviors (Halman and Draulans 2006).

Most research investigates religiosity or spirituality without considering specific beliefs, but those studies that have examined more specific beliefs have found differences in effects. One study found that adolescent attitudes toward pornography partially mediated the relationship between religiosity and pornography use (Hardy et al. 2013). Moreo- ver, belief in demonic beings (Nie and Olson 2016) and the belief that God has perfectionistic standards that cannot be met (Wang et al. 2018) are associated with negative mental health outcomes.

Religion as a Source of Meaning and Meaning‑Making Religious beliefs are unique in their ability to fill the inherent human need for meaning; religion provides a reliable, well- developed, and shared meaning system that helps people cope during stress (Park et al. 2013). As such, meaning- making is a commonly proposed mechanism to explain the benefits of religion in adolescence (King and Furrow 2008).

Moreover, threats to meaning, which tend to emerge during times of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, mortality salience, or injured self-esteem (as described by the meaning maintenance model; Heine et al. 2006), motivate adolescents to endorse religious ideals and beliefs as a means to ame- liorate these threats. For example, in a study that examined transformative experiences on a trip with a Christian evangelical organization for adolescents, researchers found that adolescents who rated their personal goals as less meaningful and more conflicting before the trip were more likely to make a decision to recommit their life to God at the trip’s end, suggesting that religion functions to shore up a defi- cient meaning system (Schnitker et al. 2009c).¹ Notably, trait measures of meaning were not significant predictors, which suggests situational meaning measured at the level of characteristic adaptations is a better predictor of religiosity across time.²

Although few experimental studies have been conducted with adolescent participants to isolate the effects of meaning threats on religious beliefs, many experimental studies with adults have examined how increased endorsement of

1 Although the authors could not test for subsequent changes in goal meaning and conflict in this study, previous research with the organization supports that continued involvement in Young Life activities corresponds to increases in meaning and purpose in life (Schnitker et al. 2014a).

2 However, cross-sectional findings find that both global and situational meaning partially mediate the relationship between religious belief and coping in adolescents (Krok 2015).

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religious beliefs is activated under two specific types of threats in the laboratory: uncertainty and death salience threats. First, numerous studies have shown that in the face of anxiety related to uncertainty threats (e.g., made to question the likelihood future success in interpersonal relationships or academic achievement), people will increase endorsement of religious beliefs and ideals as a form of reactive approach motivation (McGregor et al. 2010, 2013; Nash et al. 2011). Reactive approach motivation is the general ten- dency for humans in states of goal conflict and uncertainty to engage higher order and abstract approach goals, which alleviate the anxiety stemming from goal conflict (though it does not necessarily resolve the conflict); religious beliefs and ideals are an excellent target for reactive approach motivation because they are transcendent and unconstrained by the temporal realm (McGregor et al. 2010). Such turning to religious ideals in response to uncertainty threats positively functions to provide a source of compensatory control for many people (Kay et al. 2010), but it also likely underlies many forms of antisocial religious extremism (McGregor et al. 2013).

Second, terror management theory maintains people tend to increase their endorsement of cultural worldviews, such as religious beliefs, when they experience death anxiety in response to reminders of their own mortality (Vail et al.

2010). Numerous studies demonstrate that experimental manipulations to increase mortality salience (as opposed to manipulations that activate negative emotions without priming death, such as a dentist visit) increase beliefs in afterlife, supernatural agency, and mind–body dualism, which alleviate death anxiety (Vail et al. 2010). Examination of these theories among adolescents is needed as it is unknown whether these processes replicate in adolescence.

Religious Beliefs Can Also Be a Source of Distress

Even though religious meaning and meaning-making are often a resource for decreased internalizing symptoms, they can also increase distress and symptoms of mental illness in some circumstances (Warner et al. 2009). When people view their lives through a religious meaning system, they are more likely to imbue their important relationships (e.g., parent, child, spouse) and goals (e.g., job success) with sacred meaning (Emmons and Schnitker 2013). Although this sanctification tends to energize goal pursuit and enhance well-being, it can also lead to negative outcomes when relationships or goals fail because the loss is experienced as a desecration. For example, adolescents who appraised their parents’ divorce as a sacred loss reported higher levels of depression, anxiety, and abandonment as young adults (Warner et al. 2009).

Research suggests struggles related to spirituality are quite common during adolescence. In a study of 319 high

school students, all but 16 students reported at least some religious or spiritual struggles (Homolka et al. 2018). The most common types of struggles involved spiritual difficul- ties with ultimate meaning, morality, or doubt, but other struggles were also present (e.g., divine, demonic, interpersonal). For all forms of spiritual/religious struggles assessed, researchers found cross-sectional associations with poor well-being. Likewise, in a 6-month longitudinal study of adolescents recruited from a psychiatric outpatient clinic, cross-sectional analyses controlling for substance use and social support revealed positive associations between depressive symptoms and negative religious support, loss of faith, and negative religious coping as well as a negative association between depressive symptoms and forgive- ness (Dew et al. 2010). Moreover, loss of faith, which likely indicates a meaning system crisis, predicted lower levels of improvement in depression symptoms across time. Thus, religious meaning and beliefs can relate positively and negatively to well-being.

Characteristic Adaptations for Belonging Through Religion

Belonging operates as the social basis of religion, encom- passing people’s desire for group membership and social support. Research on religious belonging in adolescence has focused primarily on (a) patterns of engagement in religious groups across adolescence, and (b) social support and related benefits of religious affiliation.

Religious Engagement

Religious engagement, broadly defined, is involvement in one’s religious institution, be it through religious service attendance, participation in religious activities, or devo- tion to religious traditions and customs (Hope et al. 2017).

There has been much developmental research exploring the general patterns and trends of religious engagement. In a 34-year longitudinal study, religious attendance showed a steep quadratic decline across adolescence (Hayward and Krause 2013), and other research implied that adolescent religious service attendance generally declines over time and across all levels of religious attachment (Hardie et al. 2016).

However, recent person-centered approaches suggest that religious engagement depends on individual religiosity rather than generalized trends. Data analyses from a sample of African American youth utilizing latent class growth analysis revealed three patterns of religious engagement over time: adolescents who were initially low in religiosity and remained low over time; adolescents who were high in initial religiosity and remained high; and adolescents who were moderate in initial religiosity and showed declines across adolescence (Wright et al. 2018). This indicates that highly

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involved religious adolescents maintain stable engagement.

Other research suggests that changes in religiosity may be a function of religious tradition and culture; for example, both immigrant and native-born Christian adolescents in Europe became slightly more secular across time, but Muslim immi- grants remained stable in religiosity (Simsek et al. 2019).

At a global level, interdependent cultural contexts tend to exhibit lower variability in adolescent religiosity, most likely because they place greater priority on group belonging, which increases social influence (Schnitker et al. 2020a).

Regardless of these trends, adolescents who are involved in their religious communities generally benefit from the social support derived from religious involvement. Due to the nature of religious communities, adolescents can form relationships with like-minded peers and religious leaders;

thus, religious engagement has the propensity to facilitate religious social support (Crawford et al. 2006). Adolescents involved in religious groups often experience “network closure” (Smith 2003) whereby their main social network increasingly involves other individuals in their religious congregational body (e.g., parents, friends, friends’ parents, teachers, etc.). This network closure hypothesis has been supported in more recent research in a religiously diverse sample of Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish college students, which found that highly religious students experience greater extents of parental network closure, regardless of religious affiliation (Park and Sharma 2016).

Social Support and Related Outcomes

There is an abundance of research on religious involvement and positive outcomes in adults; however, only recently has this literature started to explain the nuances of religious belonging in adolescent populations. In an extension of salutogenic theory (which postulates that sense of coherence is shaped by one’s life experiences), individuals with a strong sense of coherence stemming from their religious communities are less likely to let tension turn into unhealthy levels of stress because social coherence (or perceived religious belonging) buffers the negative consequences of life stressors (Braun-Lewensohn and Sagy 2011). Several studies support this proposal and suggest that religious belonging, through social support, can buffer negative effects of discrimination in racial and religious minorities. In a nation- ally representative sample of African American and Carib- bean Black adolescents (N = 1170), researchers found that although racial discrimination can increase the likelihood of developing mental illness, the presence of religious emotional support buffers this risk (Hope et al. 2017). Likewise, recent research suggests that religious minority adolescents who face wide-spread stigmatization and discrimination, such as Muslim-American youth, may identify with their

religious group more strongly in an effort to maintain a sense of belonging (Balkaya et al. 2019).

Although most literature points to positive associations between religious engagement, support, and well-being, con- tradictory findings do suggest that these links may not be as strong or generalizable as they appear. Although positive religious coping was inversely related to loneliness (both concurrently and over time) in a recent study of Muslim adolescents in Indonesia (French et al. 2020), another recent study found loneliness was not significantly associated with religiosity with child welfare-involved youth in the USA (Lalayants et al. 2019). Likewise, results from a large study of over 10,000 American middle and high schoolers revealed a nonsignificant relation between identification as religious and social deviancy after controlling for other covariates and protective measures like grades and parental relationships (DeCamp and Smith 2019). These results are contra- dictory or counterintuitive to the general trends in adolescent religiosity research and imply a dire need for more theory- driven and methodologically rigorous research on religious social support and belonging in adolescence.

Characteristic Adaptations for Behaving Through Religion

The behaving dimension of religion comprises adherence to moral norms shaped by either communal or personal religious beliefs. The majority of research on religion in adolescence references the role of religiosity to foster (a) self-regulation as protecting against externalizing and internalizing negative outcomes and (b) virtue development and prosocial behavior.

Self‑control as a Protective Factor Over Time

Religion has consistently been associated with lower levels of risk behaviors like aggression, antisocial behavior tendencies, and substance use in adolescents across religiously and culturally diverse samples (French et al. 2019; Hardy et al. 2020; Kim-Spoon et al. 2014a, b; Purwono et al.

2018, 2019). Personality and social psychology theory postulates that self-control is one of the primary mechanisms through which religiosity facilitates positive effects and buffers negative outcomes (McCullough and Willoughby 2009), and multiple studies have shown clear and consistent links between religion and lower substance use through self-regulation among adolescents (e.g., Kim-Spoon et al.

2014a, b). Although personality and social psychologists theorize self-control as a primary mechanism of religion’s influence across the life course, higher levels of motivation to seek out both rewards and risks in adolescence (Romer et al. 2017) suggest that the association between religiosity

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and self-control might be especially important for adolescent outcomes (compared to adults).

Research suggests that highly religious adolescents tend to develop better self-control than their non-religious peers due to perceptions of being monitored by God, increased self-monitoring, and higher levels of actual monitoring from parents, which lower engagement in risk behaviors, like substance use (Kim-Spoon et al. 2014a, b). Recent work indicates associations between self-control and religiosity across time are bidirectional and dynamic (Hardy et al.

2020). Analyses of adolescent- and parent- reports using latent growth curve models reveal adolescents who demonstrate greater gains in self-control also show lesser declines in religiosity, and adolescents who exhibit lesser declines in religiosity tend to show greater gains in self-regulation (Hardy et al. 2020).

However, these mechanisms by which religiosity increases self-control may be subject to adolescents’ particular religious beliefs. In adults who believe in an omni- present God, priming God increases resistance to tempta- tions; however, these effects are nonexistent for adults who do not believe in the omni-presence of the divine (Laurin et al. 2012). Likewise, belief in the afterlife was positively associated with higher levels of adolescents’ future orien- tation, which subsequently predicted lower substance use, but these results did not apply for participants who did not believe in an afterlife (Holmes and Kim-Spoon 2017).

Although many studies conceptualize self-control as mediating the association between religiosity and externalizing behaviors, other studies suggest moderating effects such that high religiosity buffers the negative effects of low self- control or other environmental risks (e.g., harsh parenting) for substance-use (Kim-Spoon et al. 2014a, b) or aggression (Purwono et al. 2019). These findings align with other studies that suggest the protective function of religion for problem behaviors in adolescents is larger in the absence of other environmental constraints on behavior, such as parental monitoring (e.g., Boyas et al. 2019).

Prosociality and Virtue Development Across Time

Not only does religiosity impede bad behaviors, it also pro- motes good behaviors. A plethora of research suggests that religiosity in adolescence is interrelated to life purpose, virtue development, and increased prosocial behavior across a broad range of situational contexts. In the same study that found “mountain-top” religious transformation experiences predicted increases in well-being, researchers found that increases in religious commitment and spiritual transcendence from pre-camp to 1 year post-camp corresponded to positive changes in morality and prosociality (Schnitker et al. 2014a).

In another study utilizing a different sample of adolescents involved in Young Life camps, researchers investigated the effects of spiritual transformation on the development of particular types of virtues (Schnitker et al. 2014b). Changes in spirituality after camp predicted increased virtues 1 year later, including intellectual, theological, other-focused, and temperance virtues. Furthermore, adolescents who reported a distinctive spiritual change paired with a first-time commitment to God reported higher intellectual and theological virtues over time.

More recently, a longitudinal study following 396 adolescents and emerging adults who participated in marathon training for a faith-based charity explored the virtues of self-control, patience, and interpersonal generosity across time. Researchers found that increases in transcendent motivation—driven by religious, spiritual, prosocial, or transcendent values—corresponded to increases in generosity and patience development (Schnitker et al. 2019a). Addi- tionally, changes in intrinsic religiosity from the beginning of training to mid-training predicted increased generosity from pre-training to post-marathon, even after accounting for changes in positive affect and group belonging (Schnitker et al. 2020b). These findings suggest that changes in religiosity might promote prosociality and virtue development over time.

The Complex Association Between Religiosity and Prejudice Although religion tends to increase prosocial behavior toward ingroup members, this boost in prosociality does not always translate to outgroup members, and religiosity may actually exacerbate prejudice in the form of negative attitudes toward other groups. Rather than affecting generalized prejudice toward all outgroups, recent work suggests that religiosity increases prejudice toward specific outgroups based on religious proscriptions (Brandt and Van Tongeren 2017). For example, among adolescents from the USA, intrinsic religiosity was correlated with higher prejudice toward members of the LGBTQ community but with lower prejudice toward members of the African American community (Shepperd et al. 2019). It appears that adolescents are applying religious proscriptions from their own faith tradition as universal moral norms, but there is evidence from Muslim and Hindu youth in India that adolescents are increasing in their capacity to differentiate religious and universal norms in comparison to school aged children (Srinivasan et al. 2019). However, individual differences in religious schema may affect the extent to which adolescents are willing to view religious outgroups with or without prejudice. In a study of German adolescents, researchers found that endorsement of the schemas related to the abso- lute truth and authority of religious texts and teachings positively correlated with anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic prejudice

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whereas schemas valuing tolerance and interreligious dia- logue were negatively correlated with prejudice (Streib and Klein 2014).³

Experimental Evidence for Prosocial Effects of Religiosity in Adolescents

Although longitudinal studies illuminate the directionality of effects across time, they are unable to establish a causal association between religiosity/spirituality and behavior.

A meta-analysis of 93 studies conducted with adults found that experimentally manipulating religiosity (using explicit, implicit, subliminal, and contextual priming) increased prosociality, but contextual and explicit primes tended to produce more robust effects (Shariff et al. 2016). However, other researchers have questioned the replicability of religious priming studies and have called for registered replica- tions of effects (Van Elk et al. 2015).

Very few experimental studies of this nature deal with adolescent religiosity and behavioral outcomes. There is some evidence that studies using contextual or explicit manipulations could explain unique behavioral tendencies in adolescents. For example, Muslim Palestinian adolescents were asked to rate the worth of Jewish Israeli lives compared to Palestinian lives, both when judging from their own view- point and then from the perspective of Allah (Ginges et al.

2016). Results demonstrated that the number of participants who initially reported a higher value on Palestinian lives significantly decreased when asked to judge from Allah’s view, demonstrating that activating religion might be a powerful tool to increase prosociality by increasing the perceived worth of religious out-groups (Ginges et al. 2016).

Research on Adolescent Identity and Religious/Spiritual Development

Whereas numerous studies in personality and social psychology examine the relation between traits or characteristic adaptations and religiosity/spirituality in adolescents, far fewer studies in the discipline examine how adolescent religiosity/spirituality relate to the third level of personality—narrative identity, or objective biography—using a narrative approach. Instead, studies targeting the identity level of analysis in relation to religious/spiritual development tend to focus on (a) how general religiosity relates to identity status based on Marcia’s (1966) four quadrants or (b) how religious identity (as its own identity construct) interacts with

other identity domains (e.g., ethnic, sexual). In many ways these extant studies might be conceptualizing identity in a way more akin to characteristic adaptations than full-fledged narrative identity within McAdams and Pals’ (2006) levels of personality, but they are discussed in this section because they are the foundation for future narrative identity research.

Limited Narrative Identity Research

Despite the growing movement among researchers to engage narrative analyses for related constructs such as morality and generativity (e.g., Jia et al. 2016; Matsuba et al. 2012), few studies on religious/spiritual development adopt the narrative analysis approach advocated by personality psychologists, which asks participants to tell their life stories and describe turning points in their lives (Adler et al. 2017; McAdams and McLean 2013). These narratives are then coded on a variety of dimensions, such as motivational themes (e.g., agency, communion, growth), affective themes (e.g., contamination, redemption), integrative meaning themes (e.g., accommoda- tive processing, explanatory processing, meaning-making), and structural elements (e.g., coherence, complexity; Adler et al. 2016). This type of analysis more fully captures the third level of personality—narrative identity or objective biography—than traditional approaches.

Adolescence is the time when people become increasingly capable of constructing thematically and causally coherent stories for their lives (Habermas and Bluck 2000; Habermas and de Silveira 2008). These stories are constructed through conversations with other people whereby adolescents engage in the telling and re-telling of their own stories in relation to the norms of their particular cultural context (McAdams and McLean 2013). Research suggests that meaning-making within these narratives increases across adolescence, and the level of meaning-making present in life stories positively correlates with well-being (Chen et al. 2012; McLean et al.

2010).

Adolescents commonly adopt and adapt master narratives from their cultural surround to construct their stories, and religions are likely common sources for such master narratives (Schnitker et al. 2009b). In one of the few studies to conduct a narrative analysis of adolescent life stories in relation to religiosity, Jewish Israeli adolescents commonly wrote narratives of struggle and redemption that aligned with cultural master narratives of suffering and security from the Jewish faith (Hammack 2008). Future work should seek to replicate such findings across cultural and religious contexts.

Religiosity and Identity Status

Rather than using a narrative identity analysis, most studies on religious/spiritual development and identity examine

3 Developmental psychologists tend to focus more on cultural identity when examining intergroup exclusion. See Brenick and Killen (2014).

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Marcia’s (1966) four quadrants, which are derived from the degree to which adolescents have engaged in identity exploration and commitment (i.e., achieved as high exploration and high commitment, foreclosure as low exploration and high commitment, moratorium as high exploration and low commitment, diffusion as low exploration and low commitment).⁴ These studies tend to examine how religiosity as a distinct construct is associated with identity status rather than how religion is incorporated into identity or is itself a distinct identity.

In general, religiosity is positively correlated with identity commitment, including the foreclosure and achievement stages of identity development (Hood et al. 2018), and is negatively correlated with identity diffusion (Good and Wil- loughby 2007) and moratorium (Hardy et al. 2011). Like- wise, more literal religious beliefs are positively correlated with identity commitment (Sugimura et al. 2019). However, other studies suggest that religiosity is only associated with increased identity achievement in religion-specific domains but is associated with foreclosure for global identity (Good and Willoughby 2007). Religious crisis (e.g., religious doubting) is positively correlated with identity moratorium, negatively correlated with identity foreclosure and diffusion, and unrelated to identity achievement over a 2-year period (Hunsberger et al. 2001), but it is unknown how religious crisis is related to identity status over a longer time course.

Religious Identity and Other Identity Domains Rather than examining religiosity as a separate predictor of identity statuses, other studies examine how religious identity is integrated into broader identity within the self- system. Adolescents have multiple, domain-specific identities, including those related to religion/spirituality, that integrate to form a global identity. Thus, religion is merely one domain of identity, but it is uniquely situated to facilitate adolescent identity development above and beyond other groups (Larson et al. 2006) because it may activate the characteristic adaptations related to the four functions of religion. However, because identity is multifaceted, other identities may be more important or salient than religious identity and have a larger influence at any given moment (Roccas and Brewer 2002; Solomontos-Kountouri and Hurry 2008;

Tanti et al. 2011).

Moral identity is similar to religious identity, and the two may overlap significantly in some adolescents. Indeed, latent profile analyses of college student data reveal three profiles

for religious and moral identity: integrated, moral-focused, and religious-focused; those with the integrated profile report the most adaptive outcomes (Hardy et al. 2017). How- ever, it is unknown whether these results would replicate in early or mid-adolescence.

Religious identity also intersects with ethnic identity because religion is an integrally cultural construct (Cohen 2009). In many cases, religious participation increases ethnic identity (i.e., Bankston and Zhou 1995; Juang and Syed 2008; Smith-Hefner 1999), and the two types of identity may be inseparable in cultural contexts where religion is highly salient. However, the two identities can also be distinct and conflicting. A study of Chinese Christians in the U.S. found a conflict between Chinese identity and their Christian identity that led to rejection of ethnic identities incompatible with their new religious identity and a blending of the two where they were compatible (Yang et al. 1999).

Future Directions

Overall, good progress has been made in assimilating personality and social psychology approaches into the study of adolescent religious and spiritual development, but there is still much to be discovered using theories and methods from the fields. At a broad level, researchers have begun to use McAdams and Pals’ (2006) comprehensive personality theory for conceptualizing the developing person during adolescence (e.g., Reimer et al. 2009), but its use is far from widespread—especially in relation to religious and spiritual development. Researchers should consider examining religiosity and spirituality variables assessed across the three levels of personality (c.f., Dunlop et al. 2013 with adult participants) to illuminate the processes of religious/spiritual development within the personality system. For example, researchers could (a) examine coherence and divergence of religiosity and spirituality across the three levels (e.g., are adolescents high in trait spirituality regularly engaging spiritual characteristic adaptations and narrating spiritual themes in their identities?), (b) test whether such coherence and divergence across levels matters for developmental outcomes, and (c) evaluate whether coherence increases, decreases, or remains stable across adolescence and into adulthood. Moreover, researchers might examine whether religious/spiritual changes at one level of personality drive changes in religiosity/spirituality at other levels of personality? For example, do changes in characteristic adaptations (e.g., religious beliefs, attachment to God) tend to influence subsequent religious identity narratives, and/or vice versa?

Likewise, empirical work is needed to better understand and differentiate how Saroglou’s (2011) functional account of religion unfolds in adolescence. As adolescents are exploring the bonding, believing, belonging, and behaving

4 Although Marica’s status model has largely been replaced by more dimensional approaches in the developmental literature (e.g., Luyckx et al. 2005; Verschueren et al. 2017), research on religious and spiritual development has not always adopted the newer approaches.

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dimensions of religiosity within their particular sociocultural contexts, it is likely that they will engage some or all of the four functional categories of religion. Research is needed to better understand how the various combinations of the four Bs might affect adolescent developmental outcomes.

For example, a latent profile analysis of adolescents’ religiosity found three profiles of religiosity: high on all religiosity indices, low on all indices, and introjectors with low scores in private religious practices but moderate to high scores in other aspects of religiosity (Longo et al. 2017).

The three profiles differentially related to internalizing and externalizing symptomatology such that adolescents with the high religiosity profile demonstrated the highest levels of adjustment whereas and those with the introjecting profile demonstrated the lowest levels of adjustment.

Moreover, it is unknown whether there are typical developmental trajectories of engagement with the four Bs from early adolescence to young adulthood. For example, might most early adolescents equally engage all four Bs but come to emphasize certain functions as they age, or will adolescents tend to engage the four Bs in a typical developmental sequence (e.g., they first belong to a religious group that provide experiences of bonding, which influence believing and behaving)? Extant research shows decreases in religious attendance are sharper and more prevalent than decreases in religious beliefs, religious affiliation, or religious importance across adolescence (Wink et al. 2019). However, these data do not directly assess such questions, and these variables do not directly map onto Saroglou’s four functions. Moreover, Saroglou’s (2011) theory emphasizes cultural variability in the four Bs, so researchers should test for cultural differences in such developmental sequences of religious functions as well as variability in the expression of the four Bs among adolescents.

Though there are myriad avenues for future inquiry on adolescent religious and spiritual development based on personality and social psychology theories and methods, there are four particular branches of research that would likely yield important findings for understanding adolescent religious and spiritual development: (a) employing McAdams and Pal’s levels of personality and Saroglou’s four Bs to analyze conversion experiences, (b) merging narrative identity with identity status approaches, (c) using more experimental designs, and (d) adopting a more holistic view of traits based on experience sampling data.

Employ McAdams and Pal’s Levels of Personality and Saroglou’s Four Bs to Analyze Religious and Spiritual Conversions and Transformation Religious/spiritual conversion and transformation are phe- nomena that warrant further study in light of McAdams and Pal’s (2006) and Saroglou’s (2011) theories. Conversions are

defined as changes in religiosity/spirituality that are (a) distin- guishable from learning or developmental processes and (b) phenomenologically distinctive such that people can describe a qualitative change in their faith (Paloutzian 2005). Even though conversions and transformation are most common in adolescence (Regnerus and Uecker 2006), there are only a few studies examining the antecedents and consequences of adolescent conversions/transformations that utilize prospective research designs (see descriptions of findings above;

Granqvist and Hagekull 2003; Schnitker et al. 2009c, 2012, 2014a, b), though there is a slightly larger literature for adults (e.g., Kirkpatrick 1997, 1998; Hui et al. 2017, 2018; Stronge et al. 2020). Prospective research designs are essential because retrospective reports of pre-conversion personality are likely biased to fit “conversion scripts” of the religious community (Paloutzian et al. 1999).

Researchers in this area regularly comment on the diffi- culties of measuring conversions and transformation among adolescents (e.g., Schnitker et al. 2014a), which stems from the reality that there are a variety of events that may be classified as conversions (e.g., apostasy/defection from faith, intensifica- tion of faith, new engagement in a faith community, change in religious tradition; Rambo 1993) and many pathways or motifs that characterize the process by which a conversion is driven, including intellectual, mystical, experimental, affectional, revivalist, and coercive motifs (Lofland and Skonovd 1981). It seems likely that these conversion types and motifs might differ in the extent to which change within the personality system (a) originates at the level of traits, characteristic adaptations, or narrative identity and (b) is driven by the bonding, believing, belonging, and behaving functions of religion. For example, a conversion classified as having an intellectual motif is likely driven by the believing function of religion and originates at the level of characteristic adaptations as the convert adopts new schemas for processing the world that then become incorporated into trait spirituality and a religious narrative identity.

In contrast, a conversion classified as a mystical motif is likely driven by the bonding function of religion and originates at the level of narrative identity as the convert incorporates a dramatic mystical experience into narrative identity, which then trickles down to change trait spirituality and religious characteristic adaptations. Researchers should assess whether such patterns exist by measuring the discrete functions of religion at each of the three personality levels; such a measurement approach will improve measurement of conversion experiences that is useful for addressing other research questions as well.

Examine Narrative Identity and Integrate with Identity Status Approaches

Studies are sorely needed to examine how religiosity relates to life stories using narrative analysis as proposed by personality psychologists (McAdams and McLean 2013).

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Nearly all extant studies examining religiosity and adolescent identity examine Marcia’s (1966) identity statuses or the ways religious identity interacts with other identity domains. Thus, qualitative research using narrative analysis is essential at this point in time to understand how religious and spiritual development occur at the personality level of narrative identity.

Moreover, research integrating narrative approaches and identity status approaches to is needed. A few studies have integrated these approaches in young adult samples to address religiosity/spirituality. In one study examining identity status, narratives, and content among college students, researchers found that few participants mentioned religious ideology in their narratives, but many participants reported existential content (McLean et al. 2016b), which aligns well with many conceptualizations of spirituality. Narrative meaning was positively correlated with ego development, and meaning-making in narratives was more frequent when participants engaged multiple content domains (i.e., interpersonal, existential, ideological). Furthermore, narratives with ideological content (which includes explicit religious content) or interpersonal content tended to have more meaning than existential content.

In a different study, college students were asked to write identity narratives for eight domains (occupation, values, politics, religion, family, romance, friends, sex roles;

McLean et al. 2016a). Narratives written on religion were rated as the highest in meaning, but about a quarter of participants primarily wrote about a different domain—mostly family, friends, or values—when prompted to write about religion. Also, identity exploration was positively correlated with meaning making in narratives. This last finding has been replicated in a different study analyzing faith turning points of Christian participants such that emerging adults who exhibited more meaning and complexity in their narratives scored higher in identity exploration and intrinsic religiosity (Kimball et al. 2013).

These findings with emerging young adults are illuminat- ing in the way they integrate identity domain, status, and narrative in relation to religion and religious development.

However, it is unknown whether findings will replicate in adolescents who might not have the same capacities for meaning-making (Habermas and de Silveira 2008) and who are more likely to participate in traditional religious institu- tions than emerging adults (Hardie et al. 2016). Thus, there is much need for research among adolescents to test these effects.

Employ Experimental Designs to Better Assess Causal Mechanisms

The dearth of experimental designs in the study of religiosity and spirituality among adolescents is peculiar considering

the numerous experiments examining religiosity among both children (Richert and Granqvist 2013) and adults (Shariff et al. 2016). The anomaly is likely due to the realities that (a) studies with children often require experimental designs given the limited linguistic capacities of participants, (b) social psychologists tend to rely on convenience samples of college undergraduates or online panels, and (c) adolescent developmentalists prefer longitudinal designs that allow for observation of change over time. However, the study of adolescent religious and spiritual development could benefit greatly from the incorporation of experimental methods, which will likely be most fruitful when social and developmental psychologists collaborate.

Experimental designs would be especially helpful for ascertaining whether meaning threats from uncertainty or mortality salience increase religious beliefs in adolescents as they do in adults (e.g., McGregor et al. 2010; Vail et al.

2010) as well as the extent to which these religious beliefs causally predict prosocial and antisocial behavior (Ginges et al. 2016). In particular, theories and research related to approach reaction motivation (McGregor et al. 2013) and terror management theory (Burke et al. 2010; Vail et al.

2010) demonstrate that defensive adherence to religious beliefs can lead to extremism, antisocial behavior, and outgroup derogation, but people with higher levels of intrinsic rather than extrinsic religiosity were less likely to demonstrate these antisocial outcomes if allowed to affirm their religious beliefs (Jonas and Fischer 2006). Such findings align with the study examining Palestinian adolescents’ perceptions of outgroups based on an activation of Allah’s perspective (Ginges et al. 2016), and results suggest interven- tions may be developed to circumvent the more toxic forms of religiosity stemming from defensive reactions to meaning threats, such as a death education program in schools (Tes- toni et al. 2020).

Crossing Disciplinary Rifts: Religion/Spirituality and a More Holistic View of Traits

Developmental psychologists are often reluctant to adopt trait-based approaches in their work, including work on spiritual development. For example, the Measure of Diverse Adolescent Spirituality is clearly located as emerging from Relational Developmental Systems Theory, whose advocates have historically repudiated trait concepts (e.g., Lerner and Overton 2017). Innovations in personality theory and methods might help to close the current gap between personality and developmental approaches to the study of spirituality as personality. In response to situationist critiques of personality traits, Whole Trait Theory (Fleeson and Jayawickreme 2015) provides a new model of traits that includes a descriptive component and explanatory account. The descriptive component conceptualizes traits as density distributions