Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: Embodied Religiospiritual Cognition from an Attachment Viewpoint

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the interesting and well written paper. It excels as an introduction to and survey of recent work and future possibilities in the psychology of religion. The article does not claim to significantly advance the understanding of embodied religious cognition. Perhaps the most helpful feature of the paper is its proposal of embodied "religiospiritual" cognition as an alternate term. This idea merits further development.

Author Response

Thank you for the interesting and well written paper. It excels as an introduction to and survey of recent work and future possibilities in the psychology of religion.

The article does not claim to significantly advance the understanding of embodied religious cognition. Perhaps the most helpful feature of the paper is its proposal of embodied "religiospiritual" cognition as an alternate term. This idea merits further development.

 

Thank you! We are so glad to hear about your appreciation of the term “religiospiritual” cognition. Just as you state, this paper aims to be precisely that, a review of recent work with suggestions for future possibilities in the field.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a clear paper that argues for the relevance of attachment theory to the study of religious cognition. It is relatively introductory and it is primarily a summary of the literature rather than an invention in the field. The writing style is, for me, sometimes too loose for me (in ways I describe below), but it is okay to publish.

Here are ways in which the paper is for me too “loose.” The paper has a tendency to use very broad terms that lack clear boundaries, with the consequence that I cannot always tell what is being analyzed or argued. For instance, the paper speaks of (but does not define) “relational cognition.” If a person thinks of something, then I take it that they have a relationship to it. But if this is what is meant, then all cognition is relational, so perhaps that is not what is meant.  Similarly, when the paper argues that “experiences are usually relational” (375), I was lost about what else an experience could be. The paper says that experiences are usually relational, so I guess that sometimes they are not, but no examples of non-relational experiences that are given. Or maybe the paper is just using terms in a loose way.

At several places, the paper makes claims that are so obvious and ordinary that I was sure that I was missing the point. For instance, the paper says that “personal faith … can be very impactful” (134-5).  It says that some rituals “are in essence also physical” (137-8). How could rituals not be physical? What does it mean to say that they are physical “in essence”? Some of these bland statements are so generic that they seem false. For instance, the paper says: “Many worship leaders stress the importance of embodiment during worship” (147). Of course, singing, dancing, going on pilgrimage all involve the body, and worship leaders talk about singing, dancing, and pilgrimage – is that obvious point all that is being said here?   I expect that most worship leaders never mention embodiment at all, so maybe I am missing what the authors are trying to say. More problematically, I don’t know what the paper means when it says that “inviting ancestor spirits into the shamanic landscape” is an example of “non-human embodiment” (158-60). Apart from possession rituals, spirits do not have bodies, so I cannot follow what the paper is saying. But, again, maybe the authors are just not being careful with their language and they are just mentioning a ritual and not actually saying anything unusual about it.

I noted these two typos: “remains” should be: remain (24). “mean” should be: means (95).

Also, the parenthesis in this sentence is confusing. The sentence says this: “mystical experiences have been found to mediate, at least partially, the therapeutic effects of psychedelic therapy, which is also a very potent trigger of mystical experiences (e.g., ca 70% among participants in the Johns Hopkins studies; Johnson 394 et al., 2019)” (392-5). Does this mean that 70% of the participants in the JHU study had used psychedelics?

Author Response

This is a clear paper that argues for the relevance of attachment theory to the study of religious cognition. It is relatively introductory and it is primarily a summary of the literature rather than an invention in the field. The writing style is, for me, sometimes too loose for me (in ways I describe below), but it is okay to publish.

Thank you so much for your helpful feedback. We have addressed your comments below.

 

Here are ways in which the paper is for me too “loose.” The paper has a tendency to use very broad terms that lack clear boundaries, with the consequence that I cannot always tell what is being analyzed or argued. For instance, the paper speaks of (but does not define) “relational cognition.” If a person thinks of something, then I take it that they have a relationship to it. But if this is what is meant, then all cognition is relational, so perhaps that is not what is meant. Similarly, when the paper argues that “experiences are usually relational” (375), I was lost about what else an experience could be. The paper says that experiences are usually relational, so I guess that sometimes they are not, but no examples of non-relational experiences that are given. Or maybe the paper is just using terms in a loose way.

Thank you for pointing this out. We can see how the use of relational cognition could be confusing when not defined. We have noted how, as a concept, social cognition is often thrown around without much precision and we probably felt that habit had set the precedence for a similar use of “relational cognition”. We have something similar to social cognition in mind but of an even more dyadic and interpersonal nature. We now define this at the outset of the paper: “With relational cognition, we denote humans’ proclivity to seek interpersonal targets and to imbue also non-interpersonal aspects of perceived reality (e.g., nature, unseen others) with qualities that facilitate a sense of being interpersonally related to them.”  In other words, we do not mean to discuss the relational aspects of cognition in the broadest sense of “relational”; that one’s cognitions are always about – or relate to – something else. With this in mind, the sentence “indeed religiospiritual experiences are usually relational and social” might become clearer since some religiospiritual experiences can in contrast be highly private and personal (e.g., introvertive mystical states experienced in solitude).

 

At several places, the paper makes claims that are so obvious and ordinary that I was sure that I was missing the point. For instance, the paper says that “personal faith … can be very impactful” (134-5).  It says that some rituals “are in essence also physical” (137-8). How could rituals not be physical? What does it mean to say that they are physical “in essence”?

Interesting points, and we didn’t intend for “in essence” to be taken literally (as in essentialism) so we have skipped that to avoid confusion. When we say that “the personal faith and embodied experiences can be very impactful” we use this as a transition to the next sentence where we explain that the physical and sensory aspects actually can promote positive health benefits, something we find worth mentioning to stress the significance of named experiences. We agree that the sentence you mention alone seemed very obvious and ordinary and have now tied it in with the rest and added a few words for clarification purposes. When we state that “most rituals carry embodied metaphoric meaning but some are also inherently physical in nature” and provide examples such as fasting and tonsure, we aim to demonstrate that some rituals rely more heavily on physical aspects than other ones. To give an example of the opposite, in meditation rituals it is the mental observation of thought that is the primary feature (i.e., more obviously the mind than the physical body at work). If we compare this to rituals involving the shaving of the head or abstaining from food, we believe it makes sense to argue that some rituals are more directly physically expressed. We have tried to clarify this in the text in the revised version.

 

Some of these bland statements are so generic that they seem false. For instance, the paper says: “Many worship leaders stress the importance of embodiment during worship” (147). Of course, singing, dancing, going on pilgrimage all involve the body, and worship leaders talk about singing, dancing, and pilgrimage – is that obvious point all that is being said here?   I expect that most worship leaders never mention embodiment at all, so maybe I am missing what the authors are trying to say.

We could see how this part could get a bit confusing as we were not clear enough in explaining what we tried to convey. In this section, we refer mainly to the embodiment of a religious or spiritual presence that group leaders carry out and more specifically the importance of this practice that various worship leaders have expressed. We have edited the text for clarification.

 

More problematically, I don’t know what the paper means when it says that “inviting ancestor spirits into the shamanic landscape” is an example of “non-human embodiment” (158-60). Apart from possession rituals, spirits do not have bodies, so I cannot follow what the paper is saying. But, again, maybe the authors are just not being careful with their language and they are just mentioning a ritual and not actually saying anything unusual about it.

Thank you for this comment. What we try to explain is that in shamanic rituals, embodiment is believed to occur when the shaman embodies ancestor spirits. We have edited the text for clarification.  

 

I noted these two typos: “remains” should be: remain (24). “mean” should be: means (95).

Also, the parenthesis in this sentence is confusing. The sentence says this: “mystical experiences have been found to mediate, at least partially, the therapeutic effects of psychedelic therapy, which is also a very potent trigger of mystical experiences (e.g., ca 70% among participants in the Johns Hopkins studies; Johnson 394 et al., 2019)” (392-5). Does this mean that 70% of the participants in the JHU study had used psychedelics?

No, that’s not what it means, and we can see that the sentence was too packed, so thanks for pointing our attention to this sentence. Here’s what we mean and say in the revised version: “mystical experiences have been found to mediate, at least partially, the therapeutic effects of psychedelic therapy (Johnson et al., 2019). Mystical experiences are also quite common during the dosing sessions (e.g., ca 70% among participants in the Johns Hopkins studies reported mystical experiences; ibid.)”

 

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

This is a well-organized and well-written paper about which (otherwise) I have mixed feelings, as I think it is a terrific paper if there exists a body of literature on "embodied religious cognition" in which attachment theory has been previously overlooked. The authors do an excellent job of reviewing research and theory on attachment and religion/spirituality in this context, and I have no nits to pick. In this case the paper potentially makes an important contribution to this existing literature by incorporating attachment into it (and, less importantly, coining the term "religiospiritual" to replace "religious" in an attempt to cast an appropriately wider net).

 

Thank you for this comment and for your useful feedback. Our aim is, just as you are stating, to provide a review of research and theory on attachment and religion/spiritualty and more specifically the important aspect of embodied cognition that these share. This is something we believe is currently overlooked and definitely worth addressing.  

 

However, from the perspective of an attachment researcher, I was struck by the fact that very little of the content in the main body of the paper seemed to add anything new to theory/research regarding attachment and religion. I'm hard-pressed to identify anything here that I haven't said myself in over 30+ years of writing about religious beliefs and behavior from an attachment-theory perspective. The only "new" (to me) aspect of the paper is the addition of the fancy-sounding term "embodied cognition" and even fancier-sounding term "religiospiritual embodied cognition." It's always been obvious to me that

cognition/beliefs are both affected by, and produce, bodily experiences in the world; religion and spirituality contain both physical/behavioral aspects and cognitive/emotional aspects, and these affect each other. I personally don't see what value is added by calling this "embodied cognition" – as if we've been studying cognition and behavior wrongly all along and need to start over from this new perspective.

 

We agree that the embodied nature of cognition experience, and behaviors has been strongly implied in attachment-religion research, from the outset in fact. And we can see that we didn’t really point this out in our original submission. On grounds of good scholarship, we should’ve. Thus, we are very grateful to the reviewer for pointing this out. To maximize visibility, we have added the following sentence to the outset of the paper: “We acknowledge that the embodied nature of many attachment-related, religious, and spiritual matters has been strongly implicit ever since Kirkpatrick’s (1994, 2005) pioneering articulations of the attachment-religion connection. Rather than making entirely novel claims in this paper, we review pertinent literatures with explicit attention to the embodied nature of the matters at hand, in the hope that this review will be didactically and heuristically valuable”. As implied by this new sentence, we still think our paper will be didactically and heuristically useful, because we explicitly link attachment-religion theorizing to research and theorizing on embodied cognition. Fancy or not, the term embodied cognition and the research it has generated is – in our view – important because many psychologists and neuroscientists have traditionally horned in almost exclusively on the central nervous system as though the brain (mind) were the only seat for cognition. If they had not, there would have been less of a need for cognitive scientists to point out that cognition is also embodied (as well as extended, encultured, enacted, etc.). Also, although the reality of embodied cognition might be obvious to some – to this reviewer and to us – there are still those who do not acknowledge the reciprocal relation between cognition and body, who in our opinion trivialize the contribution of embodiment to our understanding of cognition (see for example Goldinger, S. D., Papesh, M. H., Barnhart, A. S., Hansen, W. A., & Hout, M. C. (2016). The poverty of embodied cognition. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 23, 959-978). Similarly, religiosity and spirituality are also often, like we mention in the paper, still viewed or at least implied as almost exclusively stemming from the mind. By pointing explicitly to the embodied nature of attachment, religion, and spirituality, and calling for direct research on embodied religiospiritual cognition from an attachment viewpoint, we think our paper may be heuristically useful.

 

With respect to attachment, at least, it seems to me that it has just come full-circle back to the ideas I and others have been writing about for years. Perhaps I can summarize my "mixed feelings" this way: From my perspective as an attachment theorist the manuscript, as good as it is, does not warrant publication because it simply doesn't add anything new to the attachment-and-religion literature; there's "no there there." However, if there exist a population of researchers out there studying religion/spirituality an "embodied-cognition" perspective, and who are unfamiliar with the applications of attachment theory to the psychology of religion/spirituality, the manuscript offers much that is new and warrants publication.

 

This is good input and of course the value of a paper is dependent on its contribution to the existing literature, which should be crucial to the publication decision. We argue that the “there” is just what you describe; that there does exists a population of scholars that overlooks the embodied nature of cognition and experiences, both in the religiospiritual and attachment domains. This manuscript is therefore educational (didactically useful) and we believe warrants publication, in addition to the heuristic point raised above.

 

Finally, we would like to bring Reviewer 3’s attention to the fact that this special issue has embodied cognition as one of its central concepts and that we were invited to this issue specifically to write a piece on embodied religious and spiritual cognition from an attachment viewpoint. And so we have. We strongly feel that this consideration also speaks in favor of the paper being published in this issue.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks to the authors for their careful and intelligent reponses to my proposed revisions. I find the revised draft to be clear and ready to publish. 

One minor comment: in the first draft, I found the term "relational" confusing, and now the paper says instead, more clearly: "relational (interpersonal)." At two points, they say: "relational (cf. interpersonal)" (lines 389, 442). "Cf." does not seem like the right connection between these two terms. It may be that the authors consider "interpersonal" to be one *type* of relational experience (I am not sure). However, if, as I suspect, the authors are treating these terms as equivalent, then I wonder whether they want to say: "relational (that is, interpersonal)." Or perhaps they should avoid this issue and just replace "relational" with "interpersonal" throughout.