Spiritual Transcendence 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.