Spiritual Transcendence Scale
Also known as: STS, Piedmont Spiritual Transcendence Scale, Spiritual Transcendence Measure, Sixth Factor Spirituality Scale
The Spiritual Transcendence Scale (STS), developed by Ralph Piedmont in 1999, measures spirituality as a broad motivational disposition — the capacity to stand outside one's immediate sense of time and place and view life from a larger, unifying perspective. Piedmont's striking proposal was that this disposition constitutes a sixth factor of personality, independent of the Five-Factor Model. The STS is built from three facets: prayer fulfillment, the experience of joy and contact with the transcendent through prayer or meditation; universality, the belief in the unity and shared purpose of all life; and connectedness, a sense of belonging and responsibility across generations and people. These facets combine into a higher-order spiritual transcendence score that Piedmont showed predicts outcomes beyond the Big Five and converges across self- and observer reports.
Key highlights
- Measures spirituality as a broad, trait-like disposition rather than tradition-specific belief or practice.
- Three-facet, higher-order structure gives both a unified transcendence score and interpretable components.
- Demonstrated incremental validity over the Five-Factor Model, supporting its claim to be a distinct dimension.
- Cross-observer convergence provides unusually strong evidence that the construct behaves like a real personality trait.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the Spiritual Transcendence Scale when you want to measure spirituality as a trait-like motivational disposition that cuts across religious traditions and to examine its relationship to personality and to outcomes such as well-being, prosociality, and coping. It is appropriate when the question concerns the broad capacity for self-transcendence and connection rather than specific religious beliefs or practices, and when you can collect the self-report (and ideally observer) ratings the validation framework rests on. It is less suited to studies needing tradition-specific religiosity content, to settings where the construct's framing of universality and prayer would not translate, or to claims about the 'sixth factor' status without the personality data needed to test incremental validity.
Strengths & limitations
- Measures spirituality as a broad, trait-like disposition rather than tradition-specific belief or practice.
- Three-facet, higher-order structure gives both a unified transcendence score and interpretable components.
- Demonstrated incremental validity over the Five-Factor Model, supporting its claim to be a distinct dimension.
- Cross-observer convergence provides unusually strong evidence that the construct behaves like a real personality trait.
- The claim that spirituality is a true sixth personality factor remains contested in the personality literature.
- Facets such as prayer fulfillment carry religious framing that may need adaptation for fully secular or non-theistic respondents.
- Universality and connectedness can overlap conceptually with openness and agreeableness, complicating discriminant validity.
- Cross-cultural use requires revalidation, since the meaning of the facets may shift across traditions.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What are the three facets of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale?
Prayer fulfillment is the experience of joy and contact with a transcendent reality through prayer or meditation; universality is the belief in the unity and shared purpose of all life; and connectedness is the sense of belonging to and responsibility for a human community extending across generations. The STS treats these three as facets of a single higher-order construct, spiritual transcendence, so they yield both individual facet scores and an overall transcendence score.
Why did Piedmont call spirituality a 'sixth factor' of personality?
Because he argued spiritual transcendence is a broad motivational disposition that is not captured by the Five-Factor Model and yet behaves like a personality trait. He supported this by showing it predicts psychologically relevant outcomes over and above the Big Five (incremental validity) and that self-ratings converge with observer ratings (cross-observer agreement). Those two properties are why he proposed it as a candidate sixth basic dimension, though the claim remains debated.
Is the STS a measure of religiousness?
No, it is deliberately broader. The STS measures the capacity for self-transcendence and connection to the sacred and to all life as a trait-like disposition, which can be present in religious and nonreligious people alike. While the prayer-fulfillment facet has religious overtones, the construct is intended to cut across traditions and to be distinct from specific beliefs, practices, or denominational identity, which is what allows it to be related to personality rather than to religiosity per se.
Sources
- 1.Piedmont, R. L. (1999). Does spirituality represent the sixth factor of personality? Spiritual transcendence and the Five-Factor Model. Journal of Personality, 67(6), 985-1013.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Spiritual Transcendence Scale. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/religious-studies/spiritual-transcendence-scale