Why people turn to religion and spirituality? As introduction, this paper reviews the considerable cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental evidence in psychology of religion literature that shows religion as a refuge from a number of negative psychological experiences and emotions. This evidence gives support to classic theorists who have emphasized the defensive function of religion against frustration, anxiety, fear, deprivation, and so on (e.g., Freud, 1927/1961; Glock, 1964; Marx, 1843/1979). Indeed, religion increases following socioeconomic distress (e.g. Wimberley, 1984). People who have experienced insecurity in attachment to parents or to an adult partner tend to be attracted by religious and spiritual beliefs, practices (Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, in press), and groups (Buxant, Saroglou, Casalfiore, & Christians, 2007; Buxant & Saroglou, 2008). The death of a loved one may also elicit interest in religion and spirituality (e.g., Michael, Crowether, Schmid, & Allen, 2003). Facing an illness, personal crises, and negative life events have often been found to predict conversion and greater religious and spiritual involvement (Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, & Gorsuch, 2003). More subtly, religion and spirituality seem to buffer against anxiety, especially death-related and existential anxiety. When mortality is made salient, people show stronger belief in God and supernatural agents in general (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006), and people with extrinsic value orientation show higher levels of spirituality (Cozzolino, Staples, Meyers, & Samboceti, 2004). The religious beliefs of the intrinsically religious people and religious fundamentalists seem to play a protective role in managing terror of death (Friedman & Rholes, 2007, 2008; Jonas & Fischer, 2006).

The present paper asks an alternative point of view: do positive life events and positive emotions can also lead to religion and spirituality? If people may turn to God and spirituality when they lose a loved one, might they also turn to God and spirituality when they fall in love? Similarly, if threats coming from the external world push people to turn to religion and spirituality, can positive emotions relative to this external world also lead to some interest in or increase of religion and spirituality? The aim of the present paper is to investigate whether positive experiences can lead to religion and spirituality.

To our knowledge, it is hard to find empirical evidence that supports a causal link from positive events and emotions to religion (R) or spirituality (SP). There is of course substantial correlational evidence that R/SP, constructs themselves theorized as components of positive psychology (Mattis, 2004; Pargament & Mahoney, 2002), are linked with positivity in life, well-being, happiness, and specific positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2002; Koenig, McCullough, & Larson, 2001; Lewis & Cruise, 2006). However, this causal direction may be double-sided. Positivity in people’s life and the experience of positive emotions are often theorized as being consequences of R/SP (Fredrickson, 2002; Hill, 2002; see also Ciarrocchi & Yanni-Brelsford, 2007; Joseph, Linley, & Maltby, 2006), especially in the presence of previous negative events and emotions, but they may also be, as we argue here, antecedents of attachment to and endorsement of R/SP.

A great deal of theoretical and empirical work on positive emotions provides arguments in favor of our hypothesis that positive experiences and emotions can lead to religion and spirituality. According to Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory and subsequent research, positive emotions broaden people’s thought-action repertories, encouraging them to discover novel lines of thought and action. For instance, inducing positive affect widens the scope of attention and increases intuition and creativity (see Fredrickson & Losada, 2005, for a review). Studies by Isen and colleagues have shown that when people feel good, their thinking becomes more creative, integrative, flexible and open to information (see Isen, 1987, for review). In addition, positive emotions enhance people’s feeling that life is meaningful (King, Hicks, Krull, & Del Gaiso, 2006) and help them find positive meaning in ordinary events and in adversity (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000; Fredrickson, 2001). Moreover, positive emotions imply the feeling of “oneness” with other people: they lead to an increase of the self-other overlap and to a more complex understanding of others (Waugh & Fredrickson, 2006), reduce the own-race bias in face recognition (Johnson & Fredrickson, 2005), and lead people to see both ingroup and outgroup members as belonging to one superordinate group (Dovidio, Gaertner, Isen, & Lowrance, 1995). Finally, positive emotions facilitate holistic attentional processing and enhance the individual’s ability to see the “big picture” (Basso, Schefft, Ris, & Dember, 1996; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005).

Based on this research, we hypothesized that positive emotions would make people more open to, interested in, or attached to R/SP. R/SP provides an alternative perception of reality, different from the perception of everyday reality (e.g., Berger, 1997). Religious and spiritual beliefs, rituals, and narratives involve intuition and creativity (Aarnio & Lindeman, 2007; Berry, 1999), positive meaning, belief in the meaningfulness of life, integration and sense of coherence (Park, 2005), positive reframing of negative experiences (Pargament, 1997), as well as prosocial and altruistic ideals and values (Saroglou, Pichon, Trompette, Verschueren, & Dernelle, 2005). More precisely, in the present paper, we make the hypothesis that mere joy, amusement, and pleasure are not sufficient for mobilizing the necessary elements that lead people to embrace a R/SP worldview. However, this should be the case for emotions that imply the experience of marvel, admiration, and the perception of the self as being enveloped by something vaster, greater, which possibly includes an element of mystery. We thus hypothesized that positive attitudes towards religion and spirituality would increase following two specific positive emotional experiences, i.e. a childbirth and appreciation of nature.

This paper presents two studies we conducted to test the causal relation between such positive emotions and R/SP. In both of them, participants (Ns = 91 and 87) watched one of three video clips that primed one of the following emotions: (1) appreciation of nature, (2) wonder at a childbirth, or (3) amusement (comedy); a fourth condition included a control, neutral video. In the first study, we investigated the effect of positive emotions on religiousness. In the second study, we investigated the effect of the same emotions on spirituality.

Going beyond previous studies that have investigated the relationship between positive psychology constructs and religion-spirituality (or the impact of the latter on the former), the present paper provides very initial evidence in favor of a causal link from positive emotions to spirituality. Indeed, results showed that religiousness was somewhat affected by the positive emotions elicited (Study 1, but not Study 2), whereas spirituality was higher among participants who were exposed to the videos eliciting self-transcendent emotions (appreciation of nature and wonder at childbirth) but not among those exposed to humor (Study 2).

Finally, the paper discusses differences between religion and spirituality and suggests that not every kind of positive emotion can elicit spiritual attitudes. Despite limitations of these innovative studies, this paper opens a new vein of research going beyond the negative aspect of psychological (or situational) realities previously studied as leading to religion or spirituality.

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