Dr Adam Powell adam.j.powell@durham.ac.uk
Lecturer
When spirits speak: Absorption, attribution, and identity among spiritualists who report ‘clairaudient’ voice experiences
Powell, Adam; Moseley, Peter
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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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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