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When spirits speak: Absorption, attribution, and identity among spiritualists who report ‘clairaudient’ voice experiences

Powell, Adam; Moseley, Peter

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Authors

Peter Moseley



Abstract

For mental health researchers and others committed to a bio-cultural understanding of religious experience, there is a need for empirical studies capable of shedding light on the interplay between beliefs, personalities, and the occurrence of anomalous sensory experiences. Absorption, a trait linked to one’s tendency to become immersed in experience or thought, may be key for understanding that relationship. Spiritualist mediums (N = 65) completed an online questionnaire assessing the timing, nature, and frequency of their auditory (clairaudient) spiritual communications – including scales measuring paranormal beliefs, absorption, hallucination-proneness, and aspects of identity. These measures were compared to a general population group (N = 143), with results showing higher levels of auditory hallucination-proneness and absorption among the Spiritualists as well as correlations between spiritual beliefs and absorption, but not spiritual beliefs and hallucination-proneness, for the general population. Findings are discussed in relation to attribution models of religious experience and the complexity of “absorption” as a construct.

Citation

Powell, A., & Moseley, P. (2020). When spirits speak: Absorption, attribution, and identity among spiritualists who report ‘clairaudient’ voice experiences. Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 23(10), 841-856. https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2020.1793310

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 5, 2020
Online Publication Date Jan 18, 2021
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Jul 8, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 26, 2021
Journal Mental Health, Religion and Culture
Print ISSN 1367-4676
Electronic ISSN 1469-9737
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 23
Issue 10
Pages 841-856
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2020.1793310

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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