Abstract:

The Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism (as a particularised measure of the affective dimension of religion) was completed by seventy-five participants at a Pagan camp in celebration of the Midsummer Festival, together with the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (including a recognised measure of neuroticism). The data demonstrated that, after controlling for sex differences (routinely found in indices of neuroticism), more positive religious affect was significantly associated with higher neuroticism scores, but was not significantly associated with extraversion scores, psychoticism scores, or lie scale scores. These findings from research conducted in a (specific) Pagan context are contrasted with the consensus from studies (employing a comparable measure of religious affect) that have tended to find that more positive religious affect was associated with lower neuroticism scores in a Christian context.

Author: Leslie J. Francis, Emyr Williams, Ursula Billington