Musical and religious experiences and their relationship to happiness

Some 230 adults, many of whom were members of musical groups or churches or both, completed scales devised to describe the intensity of their emotional feelings for musical and church activities. Membership of both kinds of group was associated with enhanced scale scores and there were correlations between the corresponding scales, showing that the two kinds of experience are quite similar. There were also differences: musical experiences were more intense for most items, including those that have traditionally been used to assess the mystical aspects of religious experience. Factor analyses of the two sets of items, augmented with further musical and religious items, found that while social and mystical factors appeared in both, the religious items also produced a transcendental factor, whereas the musical items produced a factor related to challenge and performance. The relationships between the intensity scores and overall happiness as measured by the Oxford happiness inventory (OHI) were weak, although there were correlations between the social factor of the OHI and the social factors of the musical and religious items. This suggests that it is the social aspect of these activities which generates well-being. The transcendental religious factor had a small but negative correlation with happiness.