Goal

How does religion promote physical, mental, social, and spiritual flourishing? Affective factors are likely to be central to religion's influence due to their role in wellness and distress. Affectively, flourishing is characterized by relatively high levels of positive feelings (e.g., awe, gratitude, calm). Another key to emotional flourishing is emotion regulation-- the ability to flexibly upregulate some emotions and downregulate others, using a repertoire of strategies in a context-sensitive manner. This research has suffered from cultural biases, and especially the assumption that beliefs about emotions, emotional norms, and emotional regulation strategies that are typical of WEIRD cultural contexts are universally normative and functional. However, these aspects of emotions – and, indeed, the very tendency to foreground emotions – are culturally shaped. Religion is thought to be a key aspect of culture that affects valued and devalued emotions and emotion regulatory strategies; its influence is vastly understudied. Our goal is to encourage international multidisciplinary research on how culture and religion shape emotional functioning and its relationship to flourishing, with an eye for developing culturally nuanced and ecologically valid theories of affect and flourishing that can substantially contribute to The Foundation's interests, governed by principles of cultural humility and culturally-sensitive research practices.

Opportunity

There are mature literatures on emotions and emotion regulation; however, we still know very little about these beyond WEIRD cultural contexts. The flow of knowledge has been directed from the WEIRD contexts elsewhere, rather than the other way around. Very little research has been done on how culture and religion moderate affective processes of relevance to flourishing. Religious traditions are depositories of "old" knowledge about emotion and emotion regulation. Studying the influences of religions on emotions systematically, and unpacking their effects, would allow us to understand – and capitalize on - religion-driven models and practices in a more systematic manner.

Roadblocks

Our core assumptions about emotions and flourishing in psychology are shaped by WEIRD cultural contexts and their religious traditions. Work on positive emotions has focused on emotions that are central to English lexicon and are assumed to be distinct from somatic, cognitive, social and spiritual experiences. These concepts are applied "top-down" across cultural contexts. It is critical to engage interdisciplinary international expertise to examine how flourishing is conceptualized in different cultural and religious contexts "bottom up" and examine the role of emotions. These goals will necessitate serious attention, psychologically, culturally, historically and religiously informed, to flourishing, emotions, and emotion regulation.

Breakthroughs Needed

Interdisciplinary international expertise is needed to generate breakthroughs. Proposals would need to be interdisciplinary, involving philosophers, historians of religion and emotions, anthropologists, and psychologist who study culture, emotions, and religion. Research teams need to include those that do in-depth research on culture and religion to avoid superficial work. Researchers would be encouraged to show reflexivity about their own cultural assumptions (e.g., assuming that emotional functioning and flourishing look the same across cultural contexts, limiting cultural adaptation of research projects to translation of Western-based instruments).
Methodological breakthroughs are also needed. Too much work relies on people's self-reports of their emotional lives and flourishing. Current work should include measures of flourishing "in the world" (e.g., cultural products) as well as physiological and behavioral measures and hard life outcomes. Researchers would also be encouraged to use tools for understanding bottom up conceptual and perceptual phenomena that shape flourishing (e.g., consensus analysis) and the ways in which situational affordances shape flourishing (e.g., situation sampling), and sampling emotional functioning and flourishing more broadly (i.e., a larger set of emotions, negative as well as positive emotions, other experiences that are not differentiated from emotions in some cultural contexts, such as somatic, motivational and spiritual changes).

Key Indicators of Success

• 3 years: Can we identify a set of mentored young scientists in affective science and flourishing that benefitted from this program? Can we successfully fund initial interdisciplinary and multimethod projects?
• 5 years: Have the mentored young scientists engaged in research on this topic? Have we received, reviewed, and funded proposals for follow-up projects? Have their projects launched and have some been successfully completed and shared with the public?
• 10 years: How many larger interdisciplinary projects in this area have been funded, launched, successful? Have we seen important publications linking affect, flourishing, culture and religion in rigorous ways?

Additional Information

Proposal PIs:
Yulia Chentsova Dutton, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University
Adam Cohen, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University

Technical summary:
We are proposing an initiative that would bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries to interrogate the role of culture and religion in flourishing, with an emphasis on emotional functioning (e.g., beliefs about emotions, emotional reactivity, emotion regulation). Although research on flourishing has been dominated by theoretical models that originated, and were tested and validated in WEIRD cultural contexts, some of the most successful contributions (e.g., mindfulness) were inspired by centuries-old ideas from non-Western religious traditions. This proposal aims to understand and capitalize on diversity of culture- and religion-shaped models of emotional functioning to better understand cultural shaping of flourishing and develop better approaches to promote flourishing. The goals of the proposal are to: 1) create international interdisciplinary collaborations; 2) offer training opportunities for the next generation of scholars, 3) generate research that would examine the role of cultural and religious models using cutting-edge culturally-sensitive research approaches. The authors have unique expertise in cultural psychology, study of religion, and affective science that prepare them to successfully carry this proposal out.

References:
No DOI:
Cohen, A. B. (Ed). (2020). Religion and flourishing. Baylor University Press.
Cohen, A. B., & Johnson, K. A. (2017). Religion and well-being. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 12, 533-547.
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015308
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12413
https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000737

Collaborators and advisers:
Jeanne Tsai, PhD, Psychology Department, Stanford University
Miroslav Volf, PhD, Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Yale University
Hazel Markus, PhD, Psychology Department, Stanford University
Richard Sweder, PhD, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
Paul Rozin, PhD, Psychology Department, University of Pennsylvaniq