Todd W. Hall

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at Biola University

Online religious practice is appealing to many, especially younger generations (Faverio et al., 2023). Religion can be a reliable coping mechanism for life stressors, and the COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst for evidence, suggesting a need for alternative or supplemental delivery of resources to manage and improve mental health. However, there is l...

The purpose of this study was to explore the usage patterns of USA subscribers of an online religious/spiritual application (i.e., app; Pray.com) and the associations of app usage with physical health, mental health, spiritual health, and well-being outcomes. A total of 1031 subscribers participated in the survey about their engagement with the Pra...

Research suggests that deeply held beliefs about the world, self, and others often inform subjective appraisals of stressful or traumatic events. The present study examined how attachment to God and spiritual self-awareness related to Christians’ appraisals of suffering. Specifically, we were interested in whether attachment to God was related to a...

Does God listen and respond to prayers? This project provided initial validation for a brief measure of perceived divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. As part of a larger project on religious/spiritual struggles among U.S. undergraduates, we used Sample 1 (n = 400) for exploratory factor analysis and Sample 2 (n = 413) for con...

The Enneagram is a typology that many clients use to understand their personality and interpersonal patterns, despite some concerns about its validity. Thus, the purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive and clinician‐friendly review of the extant empirical work on the Enneagram. After reviewing 104 independent samples, we found mixed ev...

The present study examined how attachment to God and spiritual self-awareness are related to evangelical Christians’ appraisals of suffering. Specifically, we were interested in whether attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance with God were related to the appraised meaning of stressful life experiences as transformational and whether spiritual s...

Religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles involve tensions, conflicts, and strains pertaining to r/s life. This research examined whether broad measures of religiousness predicted differences in the development and resolution of struggles over one year in a sample of undergraduates (N = 451) from three U.S. universities: secular public (n = 146), sec...

Although religion and spirituality typically incorporate significant affective and relational components, only recently have these components been examined both systematically and empirically. In the present study, the expanding literature on attachment was explored to create a theoretical model that emphasizes principles from “relational spiritual...

Can people grow from religious/spiritual struggles? This project assessed religious beliefs and responses to a specific struggle among Christian U.S. undergraduates through an Internet survey (N = 454; 66% female). Most religious variables correlated positively with growth (spiritual and posttraumatic growth). Structural equation modeling identifie...

This article summarizes 2 qualitative analyses investigating the experience of Christian spirituality in emerging adulthood. The 2 grounded theory analyses utilized a common dataset collected from Christian college students (n = 18) who completed the Relational Spirituality Interview, an in-depth, semistructured interview that explores numerous dom...

Within the past decade, there has been a growing base of research literature on the developmental stage that Jeffrey Arnett (2004) termed emerging adulthood. While there is still much to be known about emerging adulthood in general, even less is known about the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults. To date, few if any studies have speci...

The goal of this article is to illustrate the interaction between trauma, attachment, and spirituality, and to demonstrate how to address this interaction in long-term attachment-based psychoanalysis. Toward that end, this article briey summarizes the convergence of attachment theory and psychoanalysis, and then reviews literature on attachment to...

The study of religious motivation has been an important area of research in the psychology of religion since Allport and Ross (1967) developed their measure of intrinsic/extrinsic religion. Batson (1976) expanded the model of religious motivation by proposing the quest construct and its measurement with the Interactional Scale. Two additional measu...

This study examines whether adult attachment, God attachment and gender are related to perceived stress. Based on the literature on these variables, it was expected that adult and God attachment would predict perceived stress, that God attachment would have incremental validity over adult attachment in predicting perceived stress and that gender wo...

This article empirically investigates two alternative, competing hypotheses regarding human attachment patterns and attachment patterns with respect to people's spiritual experiences of relationship with God. The correspondence model posits that attachment patterns with humans correspond to, or are reflected in attachment patterns in individuals' e...

This chapter integrates attachment theory, emotional information processing theory, and affective neuroscience in order to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the development and transformation of God image. Repeated relational experiences with primary caregivers are encoded subsymbolically as “implicit relational representations” or...

The present study evaluated the 16PF and Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI) in terms of their ability to predict missionary success, as measured by supervisor evaluations and attrition data. A sample of 158 missionary candidates from a large, evangelical mission agency completed the 16PF and the MSI as part of the application process to become ca...

Item response theory (IRT) was applied to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Spiritual Assessment Inventory (SAI; Hall & Edwards, 199610. Hall , T. W. and Edwards , K. J. 1996. The initial development and factor analysis of the spiritual assessment inventory. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 24: 233–246. [Web of Science ®]View all ref...

Two broad relational traditions emerged in post-Freudian psychoanalysis: a broad group of relational theories, represented by Fairbairn's (1952) object relations theory, that remained within the field of psychoanalysis, and John Bowlby's attachment theory, that split off from psychoanalysis. Both of these traditions emerged simultaneously, predomin...

Psychoanalysis and attachment theory both developed independently as relational traditions within the confines of their own disciplinary walls (see Hall, 2007, this issue). While both traditions were "doing their own thing," in relative ignorance of the other, several other revolutions were occurring that turned out to pave a bridge that was alread...

The present study investigated the relationship between spiritual development, and both psychological development and cross-cultural adjustment in a group of missionaries. It was hypothesized that spiritual development would be positively related to psychological development as viewed from a relational psychodynamic perspective. It was also hypothe...

This article contends that the field of integration needs to examine the processes involved in achieving unified conceptual truths about human nature. A theory of emotional information processing (Bucci, 1997) that incorporates the concept of implicit relational knowledge is used to examine different models of integration. The authors argue that ma...

Given the emphasis on within-subject associations between depression and marital quality in recent theory and practice, this study was undertaken with three goals: to examine within-subject associations between depressive symptoms and marital quality over time, to address gender differences in the magnitude and direction of these associations, and...

The Spiritual Assessment Inventory (SAI) is a relationally-based measure designed to assess two dimensions of spiritual development: Awareness of God and Quality of Relationship with God. The present article reports the results of two studies: exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of a revised SAI, which replicated five factors, and a factor...

While the measurement of religion and spirituality has made significant progress in the past few decades, we have seen increasing criticism of the dominant paradigm in the psychology of religion—intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness. A variety of new measures have been developed, notwithstanding R. L. Gorsuch's (1984) admonition to the contrary. Re...

The present study builds on the emerging body of empirical literature examining religion from a con temporary psychoanalytic perspective that is particularly informed by object relations theory. Such a perspective leads to the hypothesis of a positive relationship between spiritual maturity, defined relationally, and level of object relations devel...

Numerous prominent psychoanalytic theories of the self are reviewed and several problems with these conceptualizations are discussed. The essential problem highlighted is that various psychoanalytic theorists have identified self with three different conceptual categories: (a) self-representations, (b) subjective experiences, and (c) capacities. Th...

The present article surveys the available empirical research on the personal (psychological/spiritual) functioning of pastors. The literature is divided into six major areas: emotional well-being, stress and coping, marital/divorce adjustment, family adjustment, burnout, and impairment. The research in each area is critically reviewed and summarize...

The present article reports the development and factor analyses of a new, theoretically-based measure of spiritual maturity viewed from a Judeo-Christian perspective and designed for clinical use by pastoral counselors and psychotherapists, as well as researchers. The Spiritual Assessment Inventory (SAI) is based on a model of spiritual maturity th...

Reports the development and factor analyses of a Judeo-Christian theory-based measure of spiritual maturity. The Spiritual Assessment Inventory (SAI) integrates relational maturity from an object relations perspective and experiential God-awareness based on New Testament teaching and contemplative spirituality principles. A pool of items was develo...

Several theoretical studies have suggested that spiritual maturity parallels psychological maturity from an object relations perspective in that both involve a relationality that is characterized by mature dependence (Shackelford, 1978; Pingleton, 1984). In addition, previous research has suggested that there is a positive relationship between leve...

Offers a review of selected instruments that have been developed to measure religious variables and to be used particularly with Christian clients. Due to changes in the field of psychology, namely, the inclusion of religion as a human difference in the revised Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (1992) and the inclusion of Reli...