Positive Adult Development and "Spirituality": Psychological Well-Being, Generativity, and Emotional Stability

Klein C, Keller B, Silver CF, Hood RW, Streib H. Positive Adult Development and "Spirituality": Psychological Well-Being, Generativity, and Emotional Stability. In: Streib H, Hood RW, eds. Semantics and Psychology of "Spirituality". A Cross-cultural Analysis. Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing Switzerland; 2016: 401-436.This chapter deals with the association between “spirituality” and indi-cators of positive adult development. While possible links of “spirituality” to men-tal health, well-being, and psychological growth have been the subject of exten-sive research, this broad interest in salutary effects of “spirituality” has gone along with an inflationary usage of the term “spirituality,” vague concepts and invalid measures. This is particularly true when “spirituality” itself is implicitly understood in terms of mental health and well-being (e. g. as meaning, self-efficacy, or inner peace). Such an overlap of concepts results in illusionary associations because the same phenomenon is measured twice. Therefore it is important to distinguish between the conceptualizations of “spirituality” and their possible associations with dimensions of mental health and well-being. In the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study of “Spirituality,” mystical experiences have been measured using Hood’s M-Scale; and SEM analyses (see Chapter 11) have evidenced that the M-Scale is an excellent predictor of self-rated “spirituality.” Thus, the M-Scale can be used as a measure for what many people today call “spirituality.” An ad-vantage of the M-Scale in comparison to more recently developed measures of “spirituality” within health research is that the M-Scale is unsuspicious to be a hidden measure of well-being. But – and this is the focus of this chapter – a set of structural equation models illustrates that the subscales of the M-Scale predict psychological well-being as measured with the Psychological Well-Being and Growth Scale, generativity as measured with the Loyola Generativity Scale, and neuroticism/emotional stability as measured with the NEO-FFI. It can be conclud-ed from these findings that “spiritual” experiences are indeed associated with positive adult development in terms of well-being, generativity, and emotional stability