For decades, psychologists have been interested in the question whether, and how, religious and spiritual behavior, in terms of beliefs, attitudes, practices, and belonging, could be scientifically studied and assessed in terms of their relative good, or ill, for human well-being. This article considers contributions of religious commitment and spiritual practice to well-being and cognitivedevelopmental theoretical models and related bodies of empirical and clinical research regarding religious and spiritual development across the life cycle, with particular attention to questions related to positive adult development.

The narrative approach to the study of moral development is based on central theoretical assumptions about self that are described in this article. Careful attention to narrative yields an approach in which language plays a much larger role in structuring moral life, generating moral experience, and shaping a far more social kind of self than assumed by the cognitive-developmental approach. The narrative approach entails a move away from a paradigm of cognitive representations and internally held principles, in which the self is regarded as a disembodied, transcendental, epistemic subject, toward a paradigm of social construction and intersubjectively possible forms of discourse, in which selves are assumed to be embodied, relational, and thus fundamentally dialogical.

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