Thriving and Spirituality Among Youth: Research Perspectives and Future Possibilities

Chapter 1

Research Perspectives and Future Possibilities in the Study of Thriving and Spirituality

A View of the Issues

Amy Eva Alberts Warren, Richard M. Lerner, and Erin Phelps

During adolescence, individuals undergo marked changes in body, mind, and social relations. Faced with such change, many youth seek earnestly to find their place in the world by defining who they are and how they matter (Lerner, Roeser, & Phelps, 2007). Youth search for a self definition—an identity (e.g., Erikson, 1959, 1968; Harter, 2006)—that enables them to matter to self, family, and society, both in the teenage years and in their future adult life. This search often impels the young person to transcend a cognitive and emotional focus on the self (Elkind, 1967) and to seek to contribute in important, valued, and even noble ways to his or her world. We believe that generosity derives from such transcendence, and that such noble purposes are the essence of spirituality (see too Damon, 2004), and may provide a key foundation for positive youth development (PYD) (Lerner, 2009).

Following the theoretical framework established in Positive Youth Development and Spirituality: From Theory to Research (Lerner et al., 2007), the purpose of this book is to bring new data to bear on the links among spirituality, PYD, and young people's generosity, that is, their striving to matter by making valued contributions to self, family, community, and civil society. The present book builds on this theoretical framework with a multimethod, cross-sectional investigation of these links, the John Templeton Foundation (JTF)–supported study, The Role of Spiritual Development in Growth of Purpose, Generosity, and Psychological Health in Adolescence (e.g., Lerner et al., 2007; Roeser et al., 2007). Accordingly, this book brings together scientists who collaborated in this investigation and now have data illustrating the nature and importance of the spirituality–PYD–generosity relationship, both for understanding fundamental features of adolescent development and for providing a foundation for future, longitudinal research. Only such research can elucidate the interconnections among these three constructs across this life period and, therefore, provide a rich empirical basis for optimizing these relations.

Ultimately, then, the goal of the scientists collaborating in the cross-sectional research discussed in this book is to build a new, developmentally rigorous (i.e., theoretically predicated, multidisciplinary, multimethod, change-sensitive, longitudinal) database for a science of  adolescent spirituality, a field that will clarify how to foster across the adolescent years health and positive development, as well as youth contributions to families, communities, and civil society.

Such goals are ambitious and require that scientists attend to the processes of individual development, the features of the complex and changing context of youth development, and—critically, in our view—the mutually influential links between individual and context (represented as individual ↔ context relations) that propel development across the life span. Accordingly, across the chapters of this book, contributors point in different ways to the use of a broad theoretical framework—developmental systems theories—for their work, one that is useful precisely because of its focus on the system of complex individual ↔ context relations that occur within the ecology of human development (Damon & Lerner, 2008; Lerner, 2002). Table 1.1 provides a summary of the key features of developmental systems theories of human development.

Table 1.1 Defining Features of Developmental Systems Theories

As explained in Table 1.1, in developmental systems theories, the possibility of adaptive developmental relations (i.e., mutually beneficial individual ↔ context relations) between individuals and their contexts, and the potential plasticity of development across the life span (i.e., the potential for systematic change in the structure or function of behavior) are defining features of human development. Furthermore, given that the array of individual and contextual variables involved in the relations between people and their worlds constitutes a virtually open set (e.g., there are more than 70 trillion potential human genotypes, and each of them may be coupled across life with an even larger number of life course trajectories of social experiences, thus creating in effect an infinite number of human phenotypes; Hirsch, 2004), the diversity of development becomes a prime, substantive focus for developmental science (Lerner, 2004; Spencer, 2006). The diverse person, conceptualized from a strength-based perspective (in that the potential plasticity of developmental change constitutes a fundamental strength of all humans; Spencer, 2006), and approached with the expectation that positive changes can be promoted across all instances of this diversity as a consequence of health-supportive alignments between people and settings (Benson, Scales, Hamilton, & Sesma, 2006), becomes the necessary subject of developmental science inquiry.

It is in the linkage between the ideas of plasticity and diversity that developmental systems thinking can be extended to the field of adolescence and for the field of adolescence to serve as a testing ground for ideas associated with developmental systems theories. This synergy has had several outcomes relevant to the focus in this book on the links among spirituality, PYD, and generosity. The synergy among the ideas of plasticity and diversity and the study of adolescent development has forged a new, strength-based vision of and vocabulary for the nature of adolescent development (Lerner, 2009). Table 1.2 summarizes the key ideas involved in the PYD perspective.

Table 1.2 Key Principles of the PYD Perspective

As indicated in the table, a defining feature of PYD may be acts of generosity by young people (i.e., contributions of mutual benefit to self and context). Lerner (2004) has suggested that spirituality may provide the emotional and cognitive impetus for promoting in adolescents actions that transcend a focus on the self and are of benefit to others and to society. In other words, a sense of spirituality—an orientation to invest in or devote oneself to ideas and actions that transcend self-interest—is the motivation for a positively developing youth to enact generous behaviors and to therefore make contributions that matter to the world beyond the self. In short, the plasticity–diversity linkage within developmental systems theory and method has provided the basis for the formulation of the PYD perspective and its links to generosity and spirituality.

Although the cross-sectional data discussed in this book obviously do not include the fundamental, change component that is required for understanding development in general or, more specifically, for exploring changes in the associations among spirituality, PYD, and generosity, developmental systems theory is nevertheless useful in at least two ways in regard to the work presented in this book. First, because this theoretical approach was used to design the cross-sectional study on which the present volume is based (Lerner et al., 2007), the research discussed across the chapters in this book is attentive to the multiple levels of organization within the ecology of human development; these levels are always involved in the mutually influential links between individuals and contexts and, therefore, the work presented in this book provides point-in-time depictions of the nature and scope of these links and offers hypotheses regarding how, across time, individual ↔ context relations may be involved in providing positive associations among spirituality, PYD, and generosity.

The hypotheses about these relations that are drawn from the cross-sectional research discussed in this book lead to the second use of developmental systems theories for the scholarship we present. These theoretical models provide the conceptual framework for moving the burgeoning science of adolescent spirituality beyond its current status to a position within the broader field of developmental science that is based on the dynamic, across-time links between an active individual and his or her changing social, cultural, and physical ecology. By providing a framework for future, longitudinal research about not only mutually influential but also, from an optimization perspective, mutually beneficial individual ↔ context relations, the authors’ use of ideas associated with developmental systems theories offers an exciting foundation for what may become a vibrant, integrated arena for a basic and applied developmental science.

We hope that the combined impact of the chapters in this book will provide a foundation for the burgeoning of this field. Indeed, as readers engage the ideas and findings presented across this book, they will realize that the scholars contributing to it stand with Sir John Templeton (1995) in believing that No one can foresee exactly which research projects for spiritual progress should be undertaken or even the specific form that empirical inquiry may take in this realm. Nor can anyone foresee which experiments will prove fruitful (1995, p. 70).

This book provides innovative, exciting, and important ideas for creating new spiritual knowledge about the theory-predicated empirical paths that developmental scientists may pursue in exploring the nature and importance for healthy human development of the links among PYD, spirituality, and generosity. It is useful to summarize the ways in which this book makes this contribution.

THE JOHN TEMPLETON FOUNDATION–SUPPORTED PROJECT ON THE ROLE OF SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT IN GROWTH OF PURPOSE, GENEROSITY, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH IN ADOLESCENCE

Within a developmental systems approach to adolescence, the links among spirituality, PYD, and generosity involve mutually influential relations across the range of levels of organization involved in the ecology of human development. Accordingly, research framed by a developmental systems perspective must include the roles of biological-level variables (e.g., genetic and neural sources of variance) through sociocultural variables in fostering these links.

Although chapters across the book take this integrative perspective about human development as the general frame for their work, different colleagues foreground different levels of organization within the developmental system. As such, the book is organized into sections that focus on biological-level variables, on individual- and psychological-level variables, and on social- and cultural-level variables.

In order to jumpstart this effort, we embarked on research funded by the John Templeton Foundation. This project was originally conceived as a cross-sectional survey study with two intensive substudies. The first substudy was to be an interview study of youth who could be defined as spiritual exemplars, and the second substudy was to provide descriptions of brain activity that could begin to define neural contributions to the relations between spirituality and thriving. The project eventually comprised these two projects plus three additional substudies: One consisted of youth who were involved in some way in religious organizations; the second focused on physiological and brain activity measures taken while college students completed some attention and emotion regulation tasks. Because most of the research reported herein used these data, a brief description of the substudies is provided here so that we can describe the overall research context for the chapters to follow.

DESCRIPTION OF THE SUBSTUDIES

The Religious Populations Questionnaire and Focus Group Sub-Study was designed to obtain youth-centered perspectives on PYD ↔ spirituality relations for young people who were involved with religious organizations (i.e., schools or youth groups). Data were collected with questionnaires, followed by focus groups. Primary research questions were: How do these youth define positive development, and do these definitions vary by age, sex, and religious tradition? How do they define being a spiritual person, and can someone become more spiritual over time? Do they see themselves as spiritual? Who are the people who have been most influential in their spiritual development? What is the relation between PYD and spirituality among these youth?

The questionnaires were administered to 269 youth from 21 different research sites who were attending a religious school or a religious youth program in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Youth were mostly Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Unitarian Universalist (45%, 29%, 11%, and 8%, respectively). Individuals ranged in age from 10 to 23 years, from 7th grade to 4th year of college (37% middle school, 50% high school, 14% college students); 46% were male and 54% were female.

Open-ended items were included about youth perspectives on positive development, being a spiritual person, and spiritual development. We also established closed-ended items assessing PYD, contribution, spiritual practices, and transcendence. After the questionnaire was administered, 44 focus groups comprising five to seven individuals each were conducted, to collect more qualitative data from youth concerning their conceptions of PYD and spirituality.

The Exemplary Youth Profiles in Contribution Sub-Study was designed to assess contribution (generosity) ↔ spirituality relations among youth who were very involved in service activities in their communities in the Boston area. This substudy was designed to assess how these young people spontaneously talk about the role of spirituality in their lives, in general, and in their service activities, in particular.

The majority of participants were recruited from three youth-serving organizations committed to the engagement of youth in community service. Additional participants were recruited for either their notable commitment to community service or their notable engagement in spiritual and religious practices. Participants were 60 ethnically and religiously diverse high school- and college-age youth (31 in high school and 29 in college), who ranged in age from 17 to 24 years. There were 24 males and 36 females.

Youth were asked to produce a spontaneous life narrative (the Life Narrative Task, LNT; Habermas, 2007), followed by participation in a semistructured interview and completion of paper-and-pencil survey measures. In the interviews, youth were asked about their life goals and values, character, spirituality and religion, community and contribution, and imagined future. Self-report assessments of open-mindedness, ego development, spirituality, contribution, well-being, attachment style, and other constructs were also collected.

The Positive Youth Development and Spirituality Questionnaire Sub-Study was designed to assess youth perspectives on PYD ↔ spirituality relations using questionnaires with samples of youth drawn from public schools, youth development programs, and colleges and universities. Research questions included: What are the relations among various indicators of PYD and spirituality? Are these relations differentiated by age, sex, and religious tradition?

Participants were recruited from the greater Boston area. Four hundred and eleven participants aged 10 to 22 years were recruited from middle schools, high schools, and after-school programs. An additional sample of 252 college participants aged 18 to 23 years were recruited by word of mouth and advertisements on Facebook. The overall sample, therefore, included 663 individuals ranging in age from 10 to 23 years. This included 31% middle school students, 31% high school students, and 38% college-aged students. Participants were 49% female and 51% male; were ethnically diverse; and were mostly Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or having no religious affiliation.

Two versions of a questionnaire were constructed and consisted of closed-ended items drawn from established measures of PYD and spirituality. The first version was delivered on a voice-enhanced personal digital assistant (PDA) for middle and high school students. The second version was a Web-based questionnaire for college-aged participants using the same items.

The Psychophysiology Sub-Study of Emotion and Attention Regulation was designed to investigate the behavioral and physiological consequences of emotion and attention regulation, and their relation to spiritual beliefs and practices, and PYD. It has been proposed that spiritual and religious beliefs and practices contribute to one's ability to regulate attention and emotion, which has been implicated in the maintenance of health and well-being and in PYD.

Fifty-two college participants aged 18 to 23 years were recruited. Participants were 48% female and 52% male; predominantly Caucasian (67%); and mostly identified as Christian, having multiple religions, or having no religious affiliation.

A Web-based questionnaire consisting of closed-ended items drawn from established measures of PYD and spirituality was completed. Following the questionnaire, behavioral (e.g., subjective ratings, task performance) and physiological measures (e.g., heart rate, respiration, facial muscle activity, and sweat gland activity) were collected while participants worked on three tasks. The first, an attention task, was designed to assess the ability to exhibit cognitive control by testing participants’ reaction time and accuracy in the face of irrelevant distracters. In the other two, emotion and emotion regulation tasks, participants were shown pictures with emotionally negative, positive, or neutral content and asked to rate their emotional reactions to the pictures.

In the Brain Imaging Sub-Study of Emotion Reactivity and Regulation and its Relation to Spirituality and PYD, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate brain bases of emotion and emotion regulation and their relation to spiritual beliefs and practices as well as PYD. From structural scans taken of each participant's brain, features of cortical regions, like ventromedial prefrontal cortex, were measured.

A sample of 27 college participants aged 18 to 23 years was recruited. Participants were 48% female and 52% male; predominantly Caucasian (56%); and mostly identified as Christian, having multiple religions, or having no religious affiliation.

A Web-based questionnaire consisting of closed-ended items drawn from established measures of PYD and spirituality was completed (the same questionnaire used in the prior substudy). In addition, structural scans were acquired, followed by fMRIs in which participants completed two tasks in the scanner that assessed emotion reactivity and regulation (see prior description) in order to estimate the functional activity of these regions. Estimates of cortical thickness and functional brain activation were obtained.

In the chapters that follow, most of the authors used data from one or more of these substudies. In some cases, the data did not suit their purposes, which is often the case when researchers attempt to use data collected by others. In such situations, contributors to this project used other data sets and sought to triangulate findings across data sets. Whatever the specifics of the data sets they used, the work of each of the contributors to this volume supports and complements the other chapters and the overall goal of this work: to start and to advance what is, still at this writing, a largely neglected area of research on the development of youth—spirituality and PYD. A brief description of the parts of this book will illustrate the contributions made by the authors in this volume.

BIOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AND SPIRITUALITY

In the research reported in this book, several colleagues drew on data that were collected about how relations between biological-level variables and psychological- or social-level constructs were related to behavioral indicators of spirituality, PYD, and/or generosity. Moreover, showing one of the powerful uses of the cross-sectional data involved in the JTF study, colleagues who drew on the biological-level data were in many cases able to triangulate these data with information present in other, independently collected data sets. Such triangulation, which leverages the JTF study data in the service of cross validation, was a methodological strategy used by several colleagues involved in the research.

In the first chapter of the biological bases section, Chapter 2, Urry and her colleagues use the JTF brain imaging data on college students to consider how a psychological function can link religious/spiritual practices with well-being. In this volume, they focus on one religion/spirituality practice—meditation practice—and one psychological function—emotion regulation. They use the neuroimaging literature to propose that the prefrontal cortex region (PFC) activation might provide an individual-difference metric that captures emotion regulation ability, specifically the ability to use cognitive reappraisal to change pleasant and unpleasant feeling states. Results indicate that higher meditation practice is associated with higher PFC activation during cognitive reappraisal, and higher PFC activation is associated with positive emotion in daily life.

In turn, Grigorenko focuses in Chapter 3 on one defining feature of PYD, the social connections—the affiliations—that youth develop with other individuals and with groups. She argues that these connections form the foundation for spirituality and religiosity. She advances the hypothesis, and surveys human and animal literature in support of it, that biological agents, specifically the neuropeptides oxytocin (OXT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP), might be important for experiencing such specifically human feelings as spirituality and religiosity. This argument is based on research that shows that (a) OXT and AVP are important in the formation of the neurochemical foundation for demonstrating affiliative behavior and forming affiliation in animals and humans; (b) OXT and AVP also contribute to the development of the higher-order personality trait of affiliation; and (c) affiliative behaviors with a transcendent other are central to religiosity and spirituality.

As a precursor to the study of spirituality and brain development, Paus and his colleagues explore in Chapter 4 the connections between indicators of PYD, as indexed by the Five Cs (see Table 1.2), and variation in the thickness of the cortex of the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes, to determine whether cortical thickness differs by PYD. These relations were assessed separately for males and females; the findings for males in the lower PYD group were the most salient. These boys with low thriving lacked the expected thinning of the temporal cortex and had lower IQs, more depression and risk-taking behaviors, and fewer adaptive personality characteristics. This finding may indicate a relatively impoverished social context that may drive the maturation on the temporal context during adolescence. The findings also indicate that sex-specific mechanisms may be mediating the relationship between PYD and cortical maturation.

After describing prior studies of changes in brain structure following meditation and prayer found in earlier research, Lazar focuses in Chapter 5 on how certain indicators of brain structure are correlated with indicators of PYD. This work is based on data collected for the JTF project, using fMRI measurements and questionnaire measures of PYD and related characteristics. She predicts that (a) the amount of time the students reported being engaged in prayer or meditation would correlate with the thickness of the right anterior insula; (b) a specific subregion of the PFC would positively correlate with measures of self-regulation; and (c) the thickness of the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) would correlate with the connection and caring components of the PYD scale. The findings lend support, although not statistical significance, to the first two predictions. While still preliminary and based on a small sample size (n = 30), these data indicate the potential of identifying the neural signatures of PYD and spirituality.

INDIVIDUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AND SPIRITUALITY

Although biological-level processes are integral to an understanding of youth development, many contributors explored psychological processes involved in the development of spirituality, positive development, and generosity during adolescence. Based on ideas of elaborative development (Ford & Lerner, 1992), Warren begins to elucidate the dynamic developmental processes involved in commitment to the whole of humanity in Chapter 6, as instantiated by Great Love-Compassion (GLC)—that is, the wish for all to have freedom and joy and for all to be relieved of their pain and suffering. Accordingly, she forwards a nonrecursive structural model of hypothesized relationships among adaptive developmental regulations, elaborative development, and GLC. By introducing and testing GLC as one key outcome of elaborative development, Warren seeks to explain how some developmental scenarios eventuate in the emergence of an ideational and personal style marked by commitment to the whole of humanity. Quantitative findings based on the Exemplary Youth Profiles in Contribution Sub-Study provide evidence of the expected, positive covariation between an index of elaborative functioning and GLC.

Feldman and colleagues examine in Chapter 7 the complex phenomenon of religious conversion, defined as movement from one (or no) religious affiliation to another religious affiliation. This chapter reports the results of an analysis of three cases, all of whom moved from a nonpracticing but Christian or Judeo-Christian affiliation to a Muslim religious identification. The primary aims of the study were to explore (a) possible relationships between religious conversion and aspects of PYD (e.g., community service) and (b) possible relationships between religious conversion and spiritual transformation (i.e., the extent to which religious conversion as a social phenomenon was associated with tangible psychological and behavioral changes in spiritual identities, commitments, and practices). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out on the cases, providing a set of findings that yield three distinct interpretations, one for each adolescent. Each experience appeared to be motivated by different forces and reasons, unfolded in distinctive ways, and produced different social, psychological, and behavioral manifestations.

Spiewak and Sherrod explore in Chapter 8 whether there are shared developmental pathways between religious/spiritual engagement and PYD. They propose the 3H Model to capture the overlapping nature of development, with three domains of functioning common to both PYD and religion/spirituality: Head, Heart, and Hands. These domains capture the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of human experience. They argue that religious/spiritual development proceeds as part of the development of PYD, rather than as a separate strand. Specifically, the authors hypothesize that constructs of both religiosity/spirituality and PYD will fit into a single measurement model that involves Head, Heart, and Hands as their underlying factors. Data from the Positive Youth Development and Spirituality Questionnaire Sub-Study were used to construct a structural equation model to test this model, with promising results.

Using qualitative coding procedures and quantitative analyses, Mariano and her colleagues assess religious adolescents’ views of success and spirituality in Chapter 9, using data from the Religious Populations Questionnaire and Focus Group Sub-Study. Specifically, they focus on youth responses to the following two questions: (1) What are two or three qualities or characteristics of someone that you would say is a successful young person? and (2) What does it mean to be a spiritual person? Responses were coded using an Open Coding strategy, to be responsive to what the adolescents wrote about success and spirituality. These religious youth identified success most frequently with knowledge and wisdom, moral virtues, a sense of purpose, and motivation, and with social virtues such as participation in community activities and the ability to contribute to positive relationships. Spirituality was most frequently associated with the process and outcomes of spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation, having a sense of faith, and feeling connected to something greater than the self.

Racial and ethnic variation may provide distinct opportunities for or constraints on processes of spiritual development, PYD, or the development of generosity. In Chapter 10, Brittian and Spencer study the impact of religious and racial identities on PYD, from the perspective of the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) framework (Spencer, 2006, 2008). Accordingly, they examine the relations between and moderating effects of religious identity and ethnic identity on well-being and risk behaviors among a diverse group of American adolescents. In overview, age and sex were the strongest predictors of well-being and risk behaviors. However, for risk-taking behaviors, they found a significant ethnic identity by religious identity interaction, such that youth with higher levels of ethnic identity and lower levels of religious identity engaged in more risk behaviors. When analyses were conducted within ethnic groups (African American, European American, and Multiracial), this significant mediating effect (interaction) only occurred in the Multiracial group.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AND SPIRITUALITY

Social and cultural levels of organization within the developmental system are also likely to affect spiritual development, PYD, and the development of generosity, and some of the contributors explored this possibility. In the first chapter in this section, Chapter 11, Sirin and colleagues assess Muslim youth development in two U.S. cities by triangulating JTF study data with independently collected data. Using a sample of Muslim high school and college-aged youth in the Greater New York City area and a sample of Muslim middle school, high school, and college-aged youth in the Greater Boston area, these authors explore the PYD of Muslim American youth in a post-9/11 context. Using qualitative and quantitative data from both studies, the investigators consider the roles of context and demographics in mediating religious discrimination, identity, and practice, which were used to predict Muslim youths' social conscience, well-being, social competence, general self-worth, contribution, and other helping behaviors.

In another instance of the triangulation of JTF study data with independently collected information, Suárez-Orozco and colleagues study the association between religion and social support among immigrant-origin youth in Chapter 12. Using quantitative descriptions of the parents’ reports of their religious participation to provide the context, qualitative data in the youths’ own words were used to explore the significance of religion in their lives using data from the Longitudinal Immigration Student Adaptation (LISA) study (C. Suárez-Orozco, M. M. Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008), a study of recently arrived immigrant youth from Central America, China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico. At the same time, they explore the mediating roles of religious identity, positive peer affiliations, and social support in predicting such positive outcomes as well-being, sense of purpose, and reduction in risk behavior from religious involvement, in immigrant youth from the JTF study.

Bringing an international focus to this work, two research groups study the national context as a framework for understanding the ecological embeddedness of the development of spirituality, PYD, and generosity.

In Chapter 13, Mayseless and Russo-Netzer explore the relationship between spirituality and emotional maturity among Israeli college youth. The questionnaire they employ overlaps considerably with the one developed for the JTF study and thus can provide some comparable results. Using several psychosocial constructs as outcomes, these authors examine the independent and intertwined relationships between spirituality and emotional maturity. They found spirituality and emotional maturity to be related, but not for every construct and not always in parallel ways. They argue that the profile of results may reflect the importance of the community, perhaps a religious community, in supporting and promoting spiritual development. Furthermore, in line with this interpretation, spiritual development was moderately to highly associated with frequency of religious practice. This finding suggests the possible importance of the religious community in promoting spiritual development in youth even in a country, such as Israel, which is highly secular.

Zhang and colleagues expand the cross-national comparative perspective in Chapter 14. They compare youth spiritual beliefs and their associations with youth development in China and America. For the study of Chinese youth, qualitative data were obtained about Chinese youths’ beliefs about religion, which are quite different from American youths’ beliefs. Furthermore, measures from the JTF study were adapted and translated, and combined with the information gathered from the Chinese qualitative data to develop a questionnaire that was administered to more than 900 youth in China. They found that religiosity and spirituality are core components in the spiritual belief systems of American youth and are associated with positive development and with lower levels of depression and many risk behaviors. In turn, inner power beliefs are the core and dominant component in the belief systems of Chinese youth, and these beliefs are associated most significantly with PYD.

CONCLUSIONS

Across the chapters in this book, readers will encounter a rich and varied array of theoretical ideas, methodological approaches to the study of youth and spiritual development, and recommendations for subsequent research. Across this variation several common perspectives exist, which together organize an agenda for innovative and programmatic scholarship aimed at producing new information about adolescent spirituality and for enhancing adaptive relations between young people and their world.

First, in the midst of theoretical variation there is also theoretical commonality. All contributors to this book embed their ideas within developmental systems notions of human development. Second, all contributors emphasize that research must be attentive to diversity—to the variation in gender, race, ethnicity, religion, family structure, and culture that makes each person an individual. All people possess generic characteristics, and all people possess group-specific attributes. However, each person also possesses specific characteristics of individuality (ranging from their genotypes to their personal history of individual ↔ context relations across the life span). The contributors share the view that, unless research is sensitive to the distinctive characteristics of people, essential features of human functioning will be missed.

Third, the contributors note that no one method can appraise adequately the general, group, and individual characteristics of people. As such, multiple methods of data collection must be used and, ideally, each method must be triangulated with other methods in order to identify what is unique and what is common about the links in adolescence among positive development, spirituality, and generosity.

Finally, the fundamental point of scientific agreement among the contributors to this book is that all of the variables involved in the relations among PYD, spirituality, and generosity are not static. They develop dynamically over the course of the second decade of life. Accordingly, all of the contributors to this book believe that the full advancement of this quest for new spiritual information rests on the design and implementation of a major and far-reaching longitudinal research project.

As will be evident across the chapters of this book, there are substantial theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that such longitudinal work can create a new era in the study of spiritual development. The chapters in this book make clear that science and scientists are poised to engage the difficult conceptual and methodological issues involved in a search for new spiritual realities about positive development in adolescence. As such, this book will mark a watershed event in the crystallization of a new domain of scientific activity.

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Part I

Biological Contexts of Positive Youth Development and Spirituality

Chapter 2

Prefrontal Cortical Activation During Emotion Regulation

Linking Religious/Spiritual Practices With Well-Being

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Heather L. Urry, Robert W. Roeser, Sara W. Lazar, and Alan P. Poey

As described by Urry and Poey (2008), it is well documented that religious/spiritual (R/S) beliefs and practices are associated with higher levels of psychological well-being. For example, use of colloquial and meditative prayer is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction and happiness (Poloma & Pendleton, 1991), and engaging in meditative practices like mindfulness meditation is associated with positive psychological outcomes (Wallace & Shapiro, 2006). In addition, religiosity has been linked to lower levels of violent behavior in youth (Pearce, Little, & Perez, 2003), and R/S practices have been associated with decreased participation in high-risk behaviors such as substance abuse (Cotton, Zebracki, Rosenthal, Tsevat, & Drotar, 2006). With such significant outcomes at stake, an important question is raised: What factors govern