ABSTRACT
Religion is more than an organization of beliefs. It is broader in that it exists in the form of texts, symbols, and traditions, and it is narrower in that it appears in the form of individuals’ rites, habits, and other behaviors. A schema is a cognitive structure or mental representation containing organized knowledge about a particular domain, including a specification of the relations among its attributes. Schemas are built via encounters with the environment and can be modified by experience. The complexity of a schema also has implications for the processing of information. A. Tesser suggested that schemas provide criteria for evaluation and that people with highly developed schemas make confident and extreme evaluations more quickly than people without schemas. Treating religion as a cognitive schema is useful in investigating how religion can influence the coping process and outcome and also in exploring how traumatic events can affect faith.
