Introduction to the special section: Psychology of Indian spirituality and religion, emerging perspectives.

Abstract

This article introduces a special section on indigenous Indian religions, focusing on Hinduism, the world's third largest and oldest major religious tradition. Although Hinduism has been the focus of less empirical study in psychology than other major traditions, this comparative neglect appears to be changing. The present introductory article briefly sketches a few key features of Hindu tradition, suggesting both similarities and differences with Abrahamic traditions. We offer statistics on the comparative neglect of Hinduism, sketch emergent research trends and future possibilities, and introduce each of this section's three major empirical studies.

Neural network involvement for religious experiences in worship measured by EEG microstate analysis

“…More so, it has become acceptable for studies to employ useful working definitions of the applicable terms to make progress in understanding the religious phenomena of interest in a specific context (Byrne, 1999;Molendijk, 1999;Platvoet, 1999). A useful definition of religion is supposed to help aggregate findings across disciplines, to facilitate interaction in discourse, and to evoke salient interpretative frameworks (Oman, 2013a(Oman, , 2013b. Since it is sometimes difficult to differentiate the religious from the non-religious (Saler, 2000), in a famous instance, Platvoet (1999) has issued a call for a pragmatic approach to define religion.…”

Conceptualising Bhāvana: How do contemplative Hindu traditions inform understanding emotions and well-being?

“…Contemplative sciences have been in focus in the recent years in psychology, due to an increased awareness and the honouring of the applied psychology from Asian and Indian knowledge traditions/IKT (Oman, 2013; 2019; Oman & Lukoff, 2018; Varela et al, 2017). Without creating adversarial binaries, belittling existing knowledge and broad strokes of ‘East vs West’; it is indeed significant to note that the global community psychology, (Marsella, 1998) in mainstream still has been critiqued as WEIRD (Henrich et al, 2010; Muthukrishna et al, 2020; Schulz et al, 2018).…”

“…A critique may point out that several schools of thought have several differences in their theoretical positions, which make theorisations in Hindu spirituality that much challenging (Oman, 2019). Although this is indeed true, historically it is seen that efforts have always been made to successfully integrate these diverse lines of thought and practices.…”