Mental health within the psychology of religion and spirituality

Although psychology has been interested in religious and spiritual phenomena since its origins, it was not until the 1980s that the psychology of religion and spirituality was established as a specific psychological field. Within this framework, among the main lines of research, numerous authors have been interested in exploring the way in which religiosity and spirituality are associated with mental health. However, despite the considerable number of studies that address the issue, a wide diversity of mixed results is still evident in the literature. The present work intends to review the antecedents linked to the way in which these variables have been associated, taking into account the theoretical-epistemological debates that could contribute to explain the enormous differences that are observed between the different empirical findings.