Dear Luis,

Thanks for your interesting question. These links may interest you.

http://web.b.ebscohost.com/abstract?direct=true&profile=ehost&scope=site&authtype=crawler&jrnl=13210122&AN=49127035&h=yw9jF9xeaHTi%2bI0AvhZ9FEMnX1Gp1keLeK9TTz%2fHwmvAoNpuhjRaSttebNw3b3gvr4efWczLiJtz7gxSEm8wew%3d%3d&crl=c&resultNs=AdminWebAuth&resultLocal=ErrCrlNotAuth&crlhashurl=login.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26profile%3dehost%26scope%3dsite%26authtype%3dcrawler%26jrnl%3d13210122%26AN%3d49127035

http://pre-beta.com/clients/zampella/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Spiritual-IntelligenceBarrySmithPaper.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4364477/

http://www.davidbking.net/spiritualintelligence/2009ijts.pdf

Dear Stephen:

Thank you very much!!

I did not know the first two links. Your contributions will serve me a lot in my research. I appreciate it a lot.

Best regards!

You're very welcome, Luis. Wishing you the best in your research!

Dear Stephen and Luis,

I have used King's (2009) SISRI-24.  It is a very nice instrument to measure Spiritual Intelligence.  I would caution you if the intention is to use it for children and adolescents as it was validated using a college-aged sample. Perhaps, subsequent researchers have validated it for children and adolescents.  I have attached a nice article that might be useful for your literature review. 

http://thescipub.com/PDF/jssp.2010.429.438.pdf

Please let me know if this is useful.

All the best,

Dan

Dear Daniel.

Thank you very much for your answer!. I really did not know about SISRI-24. I just read the article above and I find it very interesting. I am trying to evaluate the results of an intervention program at a school to support teachers, parents and children and adolescents at each stage. I want to obtain descriptive and correlational information on this theoretical construct and also relate it to other variables (age, perceived emotional intelligence, etc.)

Best regards, 

Luis Alberto Mateos. Salamanca. Spain.

As an atheist and scientist, I had an immediate revulsion to the question: spirituality in children is a measure of the level of indoctrination by parents etc. Can you tell me what the benefit is of this research pls? I am familiar with other psychological experiments that demonstrate children under the age of 8 cannot differentiate between fact and fiction, and thus anything told to them by a person of authority is taken as true. This is why I believe teaching children about god or any other superstition should be against their human rights. They lack the cognitive power to refute or repudiate such superstition. Thank you.

Dear colleague,

Thank you for taking the time to share your opinion. I deeply respect that you define yourself as an atheist. Each person, by our biographical history and by our personal characteristics, we are totally different from the rest. I will try to answer your question, although, of course, I do not want to convince you of anything.

1. You say: spirituality in children is a measure of the level of indoctrination by parents, etc. Answer: No, spirituality in children is related to the appearance of moral development in the child. Moral development evolves to the extent that the child "learns to take into account the other" in their daily decisions when managing their own desires and emotions. They are psychological functions closely related to the activation of "mirror neurons". Piaget showed that there is a "morality of cooperation", which is the stage at which this maturation level begins, thus overcoming the previous stage, "morality of prohibition". Selman demonstrated that at age 8 the child has a reciprocal awareness and realizes that others have different points of view, and that they are aware that he has his own points of view. Kohlberg, finally, establishes 3 stages, which are basically coincident and complementary with the contributions of Piaget and Selman: Level I: preconventional morality (4-10 years); Level II: morality in accordance with conventional paper (10 to 13 years); Level III: morality of autonomous moral principles (13 years-onwards). In conclusion, moral development facilitates a freer functioning of the child, since he learns to identify himself and to direct his main decisions from his personal conscience and from the other, and not only from his instinctive drives. The child learns to decide better by evaluating their desires + their consequences, and acting thus with more intelligence. In this process, parents and educators are facilitators. It is true that there are parents and educators who do not know how to facilitate, because they do not know how to empathize with the feelings and emotions of the children, and that is why they may end up indoctrinating, that is, trying to impose their ideas with authoritarianism. (Fortunately, that has not been my experience of moral and spiritual learning.)

2. You say:  Can you tell me what the benefit is of this research pls?, Answer: Researching spiritual intelligence is to investigate the capacity for self-knowledge and self-control of one's own consciousness and the consciousness of others, the ability to make sense of Life itself from the consciousness of existence, from the humility to recognize that we have not given life, that life is a mystery still unresolved (although from science we are discovering some knowledge), from the recognition of the miracle of life , From the recognition of transcendence, etc. Who has not experienced any of this ... can not understand this intellectual restlessness. The spiritual life is the reflection of having lived the deepest experience of all who believe in transcendence: the love of God.

However, an atheist may perceive that God is a child's story. Even so, we could investigate the responses that people give when asked, for example, to write a letter to God. Believers and nonbelievers can do this, just as we can write a letter to Don Quixote (Cervantes). From the answers you can perform a "Content Analysis". I encourage you to do so, perhaps surprise you.

Finally: I quote Perez-Lancho (2016):

"From the works of James (1999) the plausibility of the empirical study of spirituality is recognized as a psychological phenomenon per se. We share the perspective of authors such as Valiente-Barroso and García-García (2010), when they affirm that spirituality and the religious phenomenon can be analyzed scientifically, like any other aspect of reality. Thus, as a phenomenon that has a mental correlate, both cognitive and emotional, neuroscience can approach the study of the spiritual phenomenon, from the conviction that all human experience, as such, must also be governed by the brain.

I recommend you read the entire article, as it contains many studies that confirm the existence of the spiritual phenomenon in people (not all).

Perez-Lancho, M.C. (2016). Spiritual Intelligence: conceptualization and psychological mapping. International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology. DOI: 10.17060 / ijodaep.2016.n1.v2.294

Best regards

Excellent response. From my perspective, you are starting from the position that there is a god and it is creating a confirmation or experimenter bias in your work.

Morality is subjective and of course, innate. Hence why children who have never experienced religion or the bible (or Qur'an, Torah etc) are able to recognise "right" from "wrong" without prompting. Plus, those two books are the very last place one should look for a foundation in morality, but that's a different discussion.

As I work with adult cognitive and social-emotional complexity, I am aware of post formal thinking and I would say that it is not in the capacity of young children to do this. So I would ask again, what are you looking for in your research, and considering my above comment on your starting position, are you looking for something that isn't there in the capacity in which you describe? In other words, there is no such "thing" as "spirituality". It is your amygdala processing an emotional response to a situation. Especially in a child's brain.

Moral development is arguable in the sense that MORE influences (more perspectives) the child is exposed to would also help to create "more intelligence" in their responses, as you state above, but this is complexity, not spirituality or morality.

I'm happy to discuss off-line if you're interested. Thanks for your reply.

Could I be included in this online or off line dialogue. I found the question and answers to be excellent, respectful, insightful and powerful. I would like to be a part of this exchange of thoughts, personally  and professionally. I am a first year student in Family Counseling, a late bloomer for grad school as I am retired  and accepting spirituality as a part of my practice has been a benefit. I would think that scientifically one  would welcome research that questions the concept of spirituality, its affect, presence or not so I  am interested in supportive dialogue in both areas.

Thank you,

[email protected]  if you go offline

 Dear Michelle:

Thank you for your interest in the subject of spiritual intelligence research. My main interest is this subject is very concrete, because I want to evaluate this theoretical construct, already validated in different scales of evaluation. And I want to correlate it with other theoretical constructs. Everything I find will try to share it in RGate for people who may be interested. I can not, unfortunately, establish offline discussions on theoretical issues, because I don`t have the time for it.

Thank you very much!