Spirituality and ethnocultural empathy among Italian adolescents: The mediating role of religious identity formation processes.

Abstract

The current study examined the unique and combined roles of spirituality and religious identity formation processes on ethnocultural empathy among Italian youth. Spirituality was conceptualized as a desire for self-transcendence. Ethnocultural empathy entails concern for those of other cultural backgrounds. It was hypothesized that spirituality would predict ethnocultural empathy indirectly by way of religious identity commitment and in-depth exploration. Religious identity commitment is the extent to which people have invested in a particular religious worldview and community, whereas religious identity in-depth exploration is the degree to which they are actively seeking to learn more about their religious belief system. The sample included 301 Italian adolescents. Structural equation modeling revealed that spirituality positively and strongly predicted both mediators (i.e., religious identity commitment and in-depth exploration) and that it had a moderate, positive direct link to ethnocultural empathy. The mediators were in turn significantly related to ethnocultural empathy, with the link being negative for commitment but positive for in-depth exploration. Finally, both of these indirect paths from spirituality to ethnocultural empathy were statistically significant. This suggests that spirituality may improve prosocial relations with those of other cultures by encouraging people to further explore their religious worldviews.

The Role of Spirituality and Religiosity in Subjective Well-Being of Individuals With Different Religious Status

“…Finally, the third process of the religious identity model (Crocetti et al, 2010; Iannello et al, 2019), reconsideration of commitment, referring to the efforts one makes to change no longer satisfactory present commitments, was not expected to have an impact on SWB (Karaś et al, 2015), and results confirmed our prediction.…”

“…Spirituality was assessed using the Italian version (Iannello et al, 2019) of the 28-item Spirituality Assessment Scale (Howden, 1992). Items were rated on a 6-point scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) and belonged to four different subscales.…”

“…Religious identity formation was measured by the 13-item Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS; Crocetti et al, 2008, 2010) that assesses three identity formation processes (commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) within the religious domain (Iannello et al, 2019). Specifically, individuals must make identity commitments, such as to particular religious worldviews, but then they can either deepen those commitments through in-depth exploration – which involves the desire to reflect, learn, and share their commitments – or step back and reconsider those commitments, perhaps in preparation to disengage from them and redirect toward different religious beliefs (Crocetti et al, 2008).…”

“…Specifically, on the one hand, religiosity is often seen as “the formal, institutional, and outward expression” (Cotton et al, 2006, p. 472) of one’s relationship with the sacred, and it is typically operationalized as beliefs and practices associated with a particular religious worldview and community (Iannello et al, 2019). On the other hand, spirituality is conceptualized as the search for meaning in life, for a personal connection with transcendent realities, and for interconnectedness with humanity (Zinnbauer et al, 1999; Benson and Roehlkepartain, 2008; Worthington et al, 2011), and it is thus operationalized as the human desire for transcendence, introspection, interconnectedness, and the quest for meaning in life (King and Boyatzis, 2015), which can be experienced in and/or outside of a specific religious context (Benson et al, 2003).…”

Athletes and adversities: athletic identity and emotional regulation in time of COVID-19

“…Taking into consideration and measuring other aspects of self-concept, such as identities relating to culture, ethnicity, race, gender, or religion, could have provided us with a wider understanding of this issue. To explore these aspects of the self, it would have been necessary to adopt other existing scales validated for an Italian speaking population, but there appears to be a lack of these measures with a sole religious identity measure [ 35 ] recently validated. On the other hand, it would have been possible to validate more general measures of self-concept for the Italian context, such as the Tennessee Self-concept scale (TSCS-2 [ 36 ]), but we considered a priority for the Italian sporting context the translation of the AIMS, which is a scale specific for the sport domain and has received widespread use across several countries [ 10 – 13 ].…”