Religion and personality: An examination across three cultures.

Data from a sample of 104 Jews and 115 Polish Roman Catholics were used to investigate whether a devout religious upbringing yields significant benefits to the individual. The Religion Personality and Mental Health Project examined the relationship between religious observance and various aspects of personality, namely: neuroticism, psychoticism, dispositional happiness, obsessionality, psychological-mindedness, extraversion and locus of control. Previous research had shown that only psychoticism and happiness were consistently, significantly associated with religiosity, with more religious individuals better off in each case. It was hypothesized that inconclusive findings in previous research on other personality factors may have largely resulted from inattention to cultural and religious differences between groups. The present study thus focused on specific religious and ethnic populations. As predicted, more religious Jews and Catholics were significantly happier, less likely to have psychotic personality tendencies, and more likely to hold external control beliefs than non-religious participants. There was no significant relationship between religiosity and neuroticism. There were some indications that more religious subjects were less obsessional and less psychologically-minded. As predicted, differences on extraversion were attributable to ethnicity, not religiosity. Attempts to examine these relationships with a Lebanese Shiite population proved unsuccessful due to recruitment problems. Analyses indicated that the project's own locus of control measure was effective for use with religious, but not non-religious, populations. These results are discussed in connection with the importance of religion as a social factor, the role of existential certainty in mental health, and the centrality of religious and cultural differences in research on religion.Ph.D.Ethnic studiesPersonality psychologyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyPsychologyReligionSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129646/2/9542947.pd