PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The entire volume aims at discovering new perspectives on whether, how and why “spirituality” makes a difference. In this context, this chapter unites central psychological perspectives and presents a new way for mapping “spiritu-ality” and explains the selection of coordinates for such mapping. Thus, this last chapter in the Part on “measuring characteristics and effects of spirituality” draws conclusions from the previous chapters: As detailed in Chapters 11 and 12, two variables stand out in their effects on self-rated “spirituality”: mysticism (assessed by Hood’s Mysticism Scale) and openness to experience (a subscale of the NEO Five Factor Inventory). We not only argue in this chapter that these two variables can be used as coordinates for mapping “spirituality” in a two-dimensional space, but demonstrate that “spiritual”/“religious” self-identification groups, semantic preferences, religious schemata and even single cases can plausibly be plotted in the two-dimensional space of openness to experience and mysticism. Thus, we conclude that these coordinates allow for accounting for and visualizing the dif-ference that “spirituality” makes.