Authors: Bassett, Rodney L.; Smith, Abigail; Thrower, Jacquelyn; Tindall, Meridith; Barclay, Jaime; Tiuch, Karrie; Powers, Colleen; Monroe, John

Journal of Psychology & Christianity, Vol. 24(3), Fall 2005, pp 210-218

Abstract:

Thirty students from a Christian liberal arts college participated in an effort to measure implicit and explicit attitudes toward religion and spirituality. The implicit attitudes were assessed using A modification of the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, Mcghee, & Schwartz, 1998), The researchers selected words with a religious flavor and words with a spiritual flavor and then used the Implicit Association Test to assess student reactions to those two groups of words, Explicit attitudes toward religion and spirituality’ were assessed through two questionnaires: the Religion Scale (Bardis, 1961) and the Spiritual Well-being Scale (Paloutzian & Ellison, 1982), The pattern of results revealed meaningful connections among the explicit measures and meaningful connections among the implicit measures but relative autonomy between the explicit and implicit measures.