A preregistered study on the relation between spirituality, religiosity, and interoceptive sensibility

The relationship between body and mind plays an important role in many spiritual and religious experiences. Previous studies that looked into embodiment in the psychology of religion have mainly focused on the motoric system or embodied cognition phenomena. Despite interoceptive sensibility (IS) playing an important role in cognition, emotion, and well-being, a systematic investigation of the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and IS has not yet been conducted. In this preregistered report, we performed such an investigation. We used established measures and collected data from a large sample to guarantee sufficient statistical power. We contrasted groups with different religious backgrounds (Christians n = 271, Buddhists n = 236, and Muslims, n = 229) to explore possible religious differences in the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and IS. As expected, the results showed that adaptive forms of IS were linked to spirituality. Significant correlations between IS and spirituality were observed across all religious groups. However, contrary to our hypothesis, these associations were strongest among Christians rather than Buddhists. While spirituality showed significant correlations with IS, the correlations between religiosity and IS were mostly non-significant when accounting for the shared variance between spirituality and IS. Our results indicate that IS, as the inner dimension of embodiment, may be a fundamental factor in shaping spiritual experiences across diverse faiths and denominations. The preregistered analysis plan, materials, raw data, and the analysis code are publicly available.