RELIGIOSITY AND THE LINGUISTIC WORLD MODEL

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to contribute to the research on religiosity’s influence on constructing the social world and on everyday experiences. In analysing the construction of the social world we relied on Szilágyi’s linguistic world model. We interpreted the model’s vertical dimension as a tool for content analysis and used it as a basis for coding stories written by participants about three pictures of the Picture Story Exercise. We found that certain dimensions of religiosity (inclusion of transcendence, symbolic interpretation, extrinsic-social religiosity) were related to the appearance of metaphoric expressions of “above” and “below” in the stories in the case of pictures that were easy to associate with religious experiences or norms. The appearance of above and below was also related to the person’s acceptance or refusal of the contents associated with the picture. However, the appearance of above and below was not related to personal characteristics like self-esteem, subjective well-being, and the capacity to experience positive and negative emotions. The results suggest that religious language – similarly to, for example, object relation schemes – contributes to selecting the person’s own social world on the basis of religious experiences and norms. The empirical study conducted in Hungary included 131 participants (88 women and 43 men). About 70 percent of the participants were Catholic, the rest were from other affiliations or non religious.