Religious Identity, Mystical Experience, and Psychopathology: A Study among Secular, Christian, and Muslim Youth in England and Wales
January 1, 2014 DOI: 10.1163/9789004272385_002 (opens in new tab) via Semantic Scholar
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractAdolescents aged 14 to 18 who are religiously unaffiliated report mystical experiences less often than their Christian or Muslim peers, yet between a quarter and a third of the unaffiliated still report such experiences. Among Christians, Muslims, and the unaffiliated, there is no association between reported mystical experience and psychopathology as measured by psychoticism and neuroticism scales within Eysenck's personality model.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Observational cohort |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 1,058 |
| Population | Adolescents aged 14 to 18 in England and Wales: 203 Muslims, 477 Christians, and 378 religiously unaffiliated |
| Keywords | Psychology |
| Key finding | Religiously unaffiliated adolescents report lower levels of mystical experience than Christians or Muslims, and no association was found between mystical experience and psychopathology across all three groups. |
Abstract
This study addressed two research questions among three samples of 14- to 18-year-old adolescents: 203 Muslims, 477 Christians, and 378 religiously unaffiliated young people in England and Wales. The first question examined the comparative extent to which the religiously unaffiliated reported mystical experience. The second question examined the association between mystical experience and psychopathology as defined by the psychoticism and neuroticisim scales within Eysenck’s dimensional model of personality. The data found a lower level of reported mystical experience among the religiously unaffiliated, although such experiences were reported by between a quarter and a third of this group. The data found no association between reported mystical experience and psychopathology among the Christians, the Muslims, or the religiously unaffiliated.