Virtues in Positive Psychology and the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

Abstract

Abstract By the early 2000s, positive psychology had emerged as a complementary subfield to those who historically focused on treating psychopathology and solving psychological problems. Because positive psychology involves the scientific study of hedonic well-being and eudaimonic virtues, a reasonable expectation is that positive psychology has transformed the field of the psychology of religion into a related yet broader field of the psychology of religion and spirituality. This could be attributable to the study of virtue, which overlaps more directly with religion than does the study of hedonic well-being. Thus, positive psychology might have drawn investigators who had not previously studied psychology of religion to study virtue and spiritual formation and to contextualize them within religious frames. We examine trends in scholarship to identify whether such commonsense assumptions are warranted. The available evidence does not appear to support this interpretation. Rather, it appears that psychologists of religion and spirituality publish research related specifically to virtues and religion within journals focusing on religion and spirituality. When scholars venture into secular positive psychology journals, they infrequently include religious or spiritual measures. We discuss some implications of these trends and the potential benefits of integrating religious and spiritual variables into the study of processes that lead to the development and practice of virtues. The general considerations for counseling within and across faith traditions that we included pertain to culture, client welfare, client autonomy, and therapist competence. Religion and spirituality are treated as cultural issues.