[MUSIC] >> Finally and ultimate thing I want to say, is I'm very interested in positive theology. >> Hello, my name is David Yaden I'm a research fellow at The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. And today I'm going to be talking about spiritual experience broadly under the rubric of what Marty calls Positive Theology. So I'll go through some theoretical information about what Positive Theology might mean and the more specific aspects about it. And then I'll go over some psychological and neurological research that's going on in that area. So first some disclaimers. Positive psychology is a science. So it must stick to what is measurable. That means that we're looking at people's reactions to things that people consider religious or spiritual, we're not looking at doing any kind of theology or philosophy. That's more outside of the purview of positive psychology. And second positive psychology findings are broadly applicable to people regardless of their belief system. So whether you're religious, spiritual or an atheist, the findings of positive psychology shouldn't be influenced too much by that belief system. Thirdly, positive psychology in my opinion can and should investigate how religion and spirituality influence well being. And that's what i'll be really expanding on today. So one thing that I'm doing now with Professor Justin McDaniel, who's the Chair of Religion Department here at Pen, is breaking down spirituality, not with a propositional definition, that is one sentence that tries to capture the essence of spirituality but with a substantive definition. And a substantive definition captures the various components that are involved with spirituality. And so, these here are the seven dimensions that we've identified having to do with spirituality. And each of these, there's a number of studies and there's a lot of literature that can be filed and organized under these various dimensions. And in psychology whenever you put together a list like this you need to choose a really corny acronym and I promise this was just a coincidence, but we have one. So when you think about defining spirituality in a substantive way I want you to think about the really corny acronym praise be. And I think when you hear about Positive Theology you should also think about this acronym, because there is studies that can be filed under each of these aspects, and importantly these aspects can be differentiated from one another. And that's what we're going to explore now. So first let's take a look at examples of practices and rituals and how they might relate to well being. So mindfulness and yoga are ubiquitous. Many people practice both. Mindfulness is one of the fastest growing intervention in health care, yoga's practiced in almost every town and city in America. And it is important to remember that mindfulness meditation was an originally religious practice. There's a lot of neuro science research on this topic, and a lot of psychology research linking it with well being. I just want to give one example of great study by Sara Lazar at Harvard, showing that long term changes in brain anatomy can take place frrom the regular practice of mindfulness meditation. So this is a really important, really popular, really potent intervention that was an originally religious practice. Another dimension of spirituality or religion is affiliation. This is where you get a survey and it asks you what religion you are, and you check a box. Okay, so it's what you, if someone would ask you what's your religion, this is what you would reply. One study that we've done with the World Well Being Project is to look at Linguistic Correlates of religious affiliation versus nonreligious affiliation across many thousands of social media posts. Okay, so here's what the language of religion looks like, and in it you see a lot of positive emotions. You see a lot of mentions of religion explicitly which is to be expected. But I want to draw your attention to the positive emotions you see there. Love. Smile. Instances of gratitude, thank. And also a lot of social processes, so you see family, friends. And so as a positive psychologist, this should give you some pause to say well, this is language of religion but mixed in there is a lot of positive emotion and positive relationships. Now, here's the language of non religion. And it looks quite different, so here you see curse words. But also a lot of negative emotion, anger. As well as some markers of cognitive processes, like the words actually and apparently. Now with a study like this, it's hard to draw too many conclusions. Because one might say that religious communities are less willing to express in a public forum negative emotion or swear words. But there's also the possibility that religious people in fact do experience more positive emotions and more tight net relationships. A lot of the research on health would make more sense, if that were true, because it's been shown that people who attend religious services, are generally in better health. So I want you to notice that beliefs are only one seventh of this model. Usually when people think of religion or spirituality, they think it's all about belief. And so I think it's really important and a very important message that I want you to take away from this, is that belief is only one out of several dimensions of religion and spirituality. For the purposes of this little talk, I want to give kind of a real quick and dirty definition of what I mean when I say spiritual beliefs or religious beliefs. Generally, I think what people mean when they say spiritual belief, is that they involve some kind of nonphysical mind. And I use the word mind there in a philosophical sense, drawing from the philosophy of mind. Something that has the capacity for experience and the capacity for agency. But for most people, it make more sense to insert the word consciousness or spirit or God in that place. And the distinction I want to make between spiritual and religious here is just that, religious beliefs and religion in general is institutionally sanctioned in a more specific and coherent way. But this is a fuzzy boundary.