Why some religious individuals are not emotionally smart? The explanatory role of spirituality

Abstract

<p align="left">In two studies, we intend to investigate whether spirituality can explain the relationship between intrinsic religious orientation (IRO) and emotional intelligence (EI). Seventy-three worshipping houses-going adults, aged 18-56, had participated in the study. Data was collected by employing Intrinsic Scale of Religious Orientation Scale, Spirituality Assessment Scale, and the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test. Our first study discovered that IRO is not a significant predictor of EI. Nevertheless, Bootstrap analysis with 5000 samples and 95% interval confidence indicated that spirituality fully mediated the link between intrinsic religious orientation and emotional intelligence in our second study. In other words, without high level of spirituality one’s religious orientation does not significantly predict their emotional intelligence. Limitation and suggestion are discussed at the end of the paper. </p>

Post-locked down mental wellbeing among Malaysian adults: factors of life satisfaction in urban Malaysia

“…In line with that, Miguel-Rojas et al [55] suggested that spirituality is positively correlated with a positive understanding that others have sympathy and empathy towards oneself, which led to the sense of receiving support from others. Consistent with that, our previous study in the Malaysian context before the MCO suggested that spirituality significantly predicts one of the preconditions of PSS, which is emotional intelligence [56] and some previous studies also confirmed that spirituality predicts another precondition, social-connectedness [53], [54]. Accordingly, various studies from various settings reported a positive link between spirituality and PSS, such as among university students in Jordan [48], women with preeclampsia [57], burn survivors in Iran [58], African American women with breast cancer [59].…”

“…Different professions might require different degrees of adjustment when practised from home, and therefore they might produce different social dynamics; in other words, the degree of adjustment to work from home (WFH) might play a moderation role 299 in the equation. The second methodological limitation is that we did not take into account of the separation between intrinsic and extrinsic spirituality, as suggested in the study of Ng and Prihadi [56]. It was questionable that our findings were not consistent with the recent studies that spirituality predicted SWL [50], PSS [56] and resilience [45].…”

“…The second methodological limitation is that we did not take into account of the separation between intrinsic and extrinsic spirituality, as suggested in the study of Ng and Prihadi [56]. It was questionable that our findings were not consistent with the recent studies that spirituality predicted SWL [50], PSS [56] and resilience [45]. The only possible explanation we can obtain is that spirituality levels of our participants were predominantly extrinsic or social-driven, and when the social religious activities were absent due to the lockdown, their spirituality score tend to be declined.…”

Metaphorical Conceptualizations of Language: Networks of Meanings and Meta-functions

“…These are circulated in applications for business, but they also apply to educational and literacy research (e.g. Toosi et al, 2016;Ng & Prihadi, 2020). The key point for the present study, though, is that it is not necessarily expected that university students in Malaysia or elsewhere would relate these meta-functions to their conceptions of 'language', and it may be even less expected that when they give metaphors for 'language' or 'learning' they might share conceptualizations which indicate these meta-functions.…”

Transformational leadership style in rural schools during pandemic: A case study in Indonesian non-WEIRD community

“…Another visible challenge in our studied community was the ingroup-outgroup prejudice tendency among the members of rural communities with different belief system, such as reported in Malaysia [21] and in Thailand [22], that individuals from certain belief system would not comply to leaders from different belief systems. Ng and Prihadi [23] explained that while religions of any kind promote peaceful social interactions, the excessive levels of extrinsic spirituality might lead people into lower emotional intelligence; where they would likely to take the superficial meanings of religious activities as being exclusive and that others are considered less holier, therefore, should not be tolerated. While the latter study suggested that when individuals approach their belief system through intrinsic spirituality mechanism, they would put higher values in their relationship with the divine power, as well as with other members of the society, the former two studies indicated that extrinsic spirituality approach is dominant in rural areas of South East Asia, and therefore might hinder any attempt for interfaith leadership.…”