Nonordinary Experiences, Well-being and Mental Health: A Systematic Review of the Evidence and Recommendations for Future Research.

Throughout history, people have reported nonordinary experiences (NOEs) such as feelings of oneness with the universe and hearing voices. Although these experiences form the basis of several spiritual and religious traditions, experiencing NOEs may create stress and uncertainty among those who experience such events. To provide a more systematic overview of the research linking NOEs with mental health, we present a systematic review of studies focusing on NOEs, well-being and mental health indicators. In a search of ProQuest and PsycInfo, we identified 725 references, of which 157 reported empirical data and were included in our review. Overall, the studies reviewed suggest that the relationship between NOEs and mental health is complex, varying according to a series of psychological and social factors. In particular, they suggest that appraisal processes play a fundamental role in the mental health outcomes of these experiences. However, we also highlight important methodological challenges such as the conceptual overlap between NOEs and well-being or psychopathological constructs, the conflation between experiences and appraisal processes in the assessment procedure, and the need for clearer assessment of the duration, controllability, impact on daily functioning and general context of the experiences. We provide a qualitative summary of empirical evidence and main themes of research and make recommendations for future investigation.

The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India.

Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extraordinary abilities, and/or psychopathology offer an important site for investigating the interplay of mind and culture at the population level. However, the difficulties inherent in comparing culture-laden experiences, exacerbated by the siloing of research on experiences based on discipline-specific theoretical constructs, have limited our ability to do so. We introduce the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE), which allows researchers to compare experiences by separating the phenomenological features from how they are appraised and asking about both. It thereby offers a new means of investigating the potentially universal (etic) and culture-specific (emic) aspects of lived experiences. To ensure that the INOE survey items are understood as intended by English speakers in the US and Hindi speakers in India, and thus can serve as a basis for cross-cultural comparison, we used the Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method to collect evidence of item-level validity. Our inability to validate some items drawn from other surveys suggests that they are capturing a wider range of experiences than researchers intend. Wider use of the RPE method would increase the likelihood that survey results are due to the differences that researchers intend to measure.

A feature-based approach to the comparative study of "nonordinary" experiences.

At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such "nonordinary experiences" (NOEs) was never fully realized due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today, psychologists tend to reify constructs, such as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (e.g., psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and psychopathological. In doing so, they face an unresolved challenge: experiences with phenomenologically distinct features may be appraised similarly within a culture (i.e., viewed as evidence for the same culturally specific construct) and experiences that share phenomenological features may be appraised differently across cultures. Here, we call for a renewed approach to comparing NOEs across cultures that prioritizes subjectively recognizable features instead of constructs. First, we review the history of the comparative approach in psychology and where it is today. Second, we introduce a feature-based approach, building on the event cognition literature, in which "lived experiences" are broken down into their phenomenological features and the claims made about them. Third, we propose ways in which cultural learning shapes experiences, and possibly the ordinary-nonordinary distinction itself. We conclude by highlighting that by building on and shifting the focus of previous efforts, the feature-based approach provides a way to compare experiences at the population level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Believing and social interactions: effects on bodily expressions and personal narratives.

The processes of believing integrate external perceptual information from the environment with internal emotional states and prior experience to generate probabilistic neural representations of events, i.e., beliefs. As these neural representations manifest mostly below the level of a person's conscious awareness, they may inadvertently affect the spontaneous person's bodily expressions and prospective behavior. By yet to be understood mechanisms people can become aware of these representations and reflect upon them. Typically, people can communicate the content of their beliefs as personal statements and can summarize the narratives of others to themselves or to other people. Here, we describe that social interactions may benefit from the consistency between a person's bodily expressions and verbal statements because the person appears authentic and ultimately trustworthy. The transmission of narratives can thus lay the groundwork for social cooperation within and between groups and, ultimately, between communities and nations. Conversely, a discrepancy between bodily expressions and narratives may cause distrust in the addressee(s) and eventually may destroy social bonds.

Mystical and Other Alterations in Sense of Self: An Expanded Framework for Studying Nonordinary Experiences.

Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through which these experiences are represented and differentiated. So-called mystical experiences, which some psychologists view as potentially sui generis, provide a test case for assessing whether we can develop an expanded framework for studying unusual experiences across disciplines and cultures. Evidence for the special nature of "mystical experience" rests on the operationalization of a metaphysically untestable construct in two widely used self-report scales: the Mysticism Scale and the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. Consideration of the construct in light of research on alterations in sense of self induced by psychoactive drugs and meditation practices suggests that "positive experiences of undifferentiated unity" are not sui generis, but rather a type of "ego dissolution." To better understand the nature and effects of unusual experiences, such as alterations in the sense of self, we need self-report measures that distinguish between generically worded experiences and the way they are appraised in terms of valence, significance, cause, and long-term effects in different contexts.

A tale of two congresses: the psychological study of psychical, occult, and religious phenomena, 1900-1909.

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub-specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experiences that had emerged at the early Congresses.