...basis of spiritual transformation, moral motive analysis. The objective of this final article is to outline a specific moral motive analysis of transformation, a "social intuitionist" (Haidt, 2001) approach that both complements and elaborates the theological tradition of orthokardia (Runyon, 1998). This article first summarizes the central hermeneutic and defining features of orthodardia, and then relates them to concepts in contemporary moral motivation theory. Second, following the Murphy-MacIntyrean framework (telos, problem, purpose), it proposes three core postulates concerning the role of moral emotions in spiritual transformation: moral telos as emerging love and the capable character, moral problem as the duplicitous heart and diminished capacity to love; and moral process as implicit relational transformation. Collectively, these postulates delineate an approach to relational affect transformation (virtue-acquisition and vice-diminishment) that is consistent with the sensibilities of Aristotelean virtue ethics (MacIntyre, 1984), contemporary moral motive theory (Emmons & McCullough, 2004), and the apophatic approach to change (Jones, 2002), thus providing a metapsychology of implicit relational spirituality for theory, research, and practice.

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Enormous confusion is bred when purity of intention (love of God, love of the Good) is demanded of man without a compassionate and workable psychological knowledge of everything in the individual human being that resists or covers over such purity of heart. --Jacob Needleman, On the Way to Self-Knowledge

Recent reviews of the psychological literature concerned with the affective basis of spirituality (Emmons, 2005; Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003; Hill, 2002) suggest that while the role of emotion in spiritual transformation has long been acknowledged in religion and psychology, the scientific and interdisciplinary study of emotional processes that mediate spiritual transformation is still in a fledgling state. Hill (1995, 2002) has suggested a number of times and places that "there are no general overarching theories of affect guiding research on religious experience" (1995, p. 355). The objective of this article is to suggest a trajectory for the development of a certain type of approach, a moral motive analysis that gives theoretical and methodological priority to motivational factors related to prosocial (loving) action.

One of the problems in the study of affective processes has been definitional, both with respect to the terms emotion and spiritual transformation. Concerning emotion, as the meaning and measurement of emotions (or affects) has improved considerably in recent years, particularly the class of emotions we are most concerned with here, the "moral emotions" (Haidt, 2003), researchers are now in a better position to study the role of emotions in personality change and spiritual transformation. Recent reviews suggest that such research might profitably focus on the role of positive (Fredrickson, 2002) and moral emotions both as "motivators of and consequences of" spiritual transformation (Emmons, 2005, p. 247). A first objective of this article is to respond to this call, offering a preliminary analysis of how moral emotions might be related to spiritual transformation.

A second question of importance in formulating theory and research in this area is the issue of specifying why moral emotions are believed to be important, to what end. Hill (2002) has encouraged investigators to avoid the tendency to "decontextualize" the study of human meaning and value, to theorize without some explicit philosophical or religious ethos that helps define the significance the emotions. He highlights the need to clarify at the outset one's metapsychological assumptions about the goal of spiritual transformation. Is, for example, the "ultimate concern" (Emmons, 1999) of spiritual transformation to be understood as an increase in subjective (felt) nearness to God (emphasizing religious experience), or as greater characterological likeness to God who has revealed an essential nature to humanity (emphasis on virtue acquisition)? While not necessarily mutually exclusive, these two spiritual visions--'nearness with' (focus on subjectivity) and 'likeness to' (focus on virtue)--suggest two different foci and trajectories for spiritual transformation, and likely yield different responses to the question of the role of emotion in spiritual transformation. Many definitions of religion, religious conversion, and spiritual transformation have been offered, and I will not here review these (Paloutzian, 2005). Rather, in this article, following the theological tradition of orthokardia (Runyon, 1998), I conceptualize the moral task of spiritual transformation as expansion of the motive and capacity to love from an increasingly pure (less conflicted, divided) heart. This becomes the critical hermeneutic from which to conceptualize the telos, problem, and process of spiritual transformation and flourishing. The task of a moral motive analysis, then, is to model "compassionate and workable psychological knowledge" of what this means, particularly some of the factors that "resists or covers over such purity of heart" (Needleman above).

As reviewed in previous articles, in Murphy's MacIntyrean analysis (Dueck & Lee, 2005) she suggested that in constructing various tradition-informed psychological models to guide theory and research, doctrine should make a difference in how one thinks about the ultimate purpose, problem, and process of spiritual transformation. Applied in this context, it will affect how we view the significance of emotion in spiritual transformation. In light of this issue, a second objective of this article is to briefly summarize selected aspects of the theological tradition sometimes known as orthokardia (re: "the right heart"). To date, while numerous treatises in the theological literature exist (Clapper, 1989; Lodahl, 2003; Maddox, 1994; Runyon, 1998), there have been fewer presentations addressed to the therapeutic community, and applied specifically to the study of emotion and spiritual transformation. This article briefly correlates three doctrinal areas from this tradition, its moral affectional anthropology, relational hamartiology, and therapeutic soteriology, with contemporary moral motive theory (McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larsen, 2001; Shulman, 2002) and dynamically informed psychotherapeutic theory (Gabbard & Westen, 2003). As discussed in previous articles, the goal is a theology-driven, "psychodynamically informed" (Westen, 1998) metapsychology ("story") of the affective basis of transformation framed within the relational spirituality paradigm (Hall, 2004).

A third objective of this article is to now more systematically spell out a specific moral motive approach, a "social intuitionist" (Haidt, 2001; Shweder & Haidt, 1993) account of the role of the moral emotions in spiritual transformation. As noted in Part 2, meaning-system analyses presently dominate the explanations of spiritual transformation and religious conversion (Paloutzian & Park, 2005). Meaning-system analyses argue that the central function of religion is the provision of life meaning and that "the thing that undergoes transformation in a religious conversion is the person's meaning system" (Paloutzian, 2005, p. 333). Accordingly, these analyses focus on constructs at the global- and mid-levels of personality. Global-level constructs refer to self-definition and identity (narrative identity) and propositional beliefs (attitudes); mid-level constructs refer to personal values (standards), personal goals (strivings), and subjective well-being (Park, 2005). In recent meaning-system models, while the potential roles of motivation and emotion variables and other "core" (Five-factor) personality traits are recognized, these lower-level constructs are less well modeled (Paloutizian, 2005).

Thus, to complement (not contradict) meaning system analyses, this article outlines a particular moral motive analysis which derives from the tradition of orthokardia. Since it is suggested here as only one plausible approach to emotion and spiritual transformation, not as an established fact, the article concludes by making several suggestions for future theory and research related to this approach.

A MORAL MOTIVE ANALYSIS IN THE "SOCIAL INTUITIONIST" TRADITION

Following Jonathan Haidt's (2001) social intuitionist model of moral judgment, the central claim of this moral motive approach is that moral action (love) is caused (amplified) by moral emotions which themselves are part of an implicit and procedural associative network which constitutes the "heart" of moral character. According to this view, moral emotions constitute but one facet in a multi-component psychology of prosocial moral action that includes: 1) preconscious moral intuitions, 2) moral emotions (motives), 3) conscious moral judgments, 4) moral virtues and vices, and 5) moral action (Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2006). Here, for limitations of space, I focus only on the role of the moral emotions. A growing body of scholarship points to the importance of emotion in prosocial action (Emmons & McCullough, 2004; Shulman, 2002). The emerging picture seems to be that both positive and moral emotions are part of the moral decision and judgment-making apparatus that leads to prosocial action (Fredrickson, 2004), and that a diminished functioning of the moral emotions leads to "motivational deficits" in prosociality (Shulman, 2002). Considering the role of the emotions in the moral life, Shweder & Haidt (1993) note that there are more options than Humean emotivism or Kantian-Kohlbergian cognitive rationalism. They suggest that the mark of cognitivist theory is the assumption that mental states serve a representational function, rather than emotivist theory that assumes mental states serve primarily nonrepresentational functions (1993, p. 361). In the "cognitive intuitionist" view, emotions re-present (sometimes inaccurately) a fact or truth about some object or event. The main tenet of cognitive intuitionism is that: "moral appraisals (this is good, that is right) are grounded in self-evident truths (intuitions), saturated with local cultural meanings, and activated by means of the emotions" (p. 360). By this view, moral emotions are cognitions invested with motivating force; they are "embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that 'I am involved'" (Rosaldo, 1984, p. 143). They are a type of cognition (meaning), but not a kind of reasoning (Haidt, 2001). Thus, cognitive intuitionism holds that emotion is essential both for moral judgment and for the "conversion" of thoughts (reasoning) into moral (prosocial) action.

Following this social intuitionist approach, this first section does two things. First, as noted in previous articles, neither the Murphy-MacIntyrean framework itself, nor the relational spirituality paradigm, specifies particular or unique theological content for the facets of purpose, problem, and process. As the interest of Murphy and her colleagues (Dueck & Lee, 2005) was application of the Murphy-MacIntyrean framework to a "radical reformation perspective," here I situate a moral motive approach within the tradition of orthokardia. Second, this section also defines moral emotions as conceived in this model. Since the construct of moral emotion is central to this approach a clear definition is needed.

Moral "Affections" in the Tradition of Orthokardia

The emphasis on formation of a "right" or "pure" heart (Ps. 51:10) as the central focus for practical theology is not to be identified solely with any one particular tradition in Judeo-Christian thought; but is likely more characteristic of some than others. Foster (1998), for example, identifies this emphasis as one of the strengths (and in its distortion, one of the weaknesses) of the Holiness tradition, but traces this perspective through other traditions as well. Within the broader tradition of orthokardia, John Wesley's vision of Christian spirituality is a quest story centrally concerned with transformation of one's affective-motivational dispositions of heart, "affections" and "tempers" as he referred to them. Wesley used the term affection and the more characterologic term temper as referents for the "motivating dispositions of the person" and considered these dispositions the heart of the person (Maddox, 1994, p. 69). In this conception, unlike the cognitive rationalist view, the human will is not regarded as a self-regulatory "muscle" which must be exerted in order to enact moral behavior or overcome obstacles to initiating prosocial action (Baumsister & Exline, 2000). Rather, the primary motivator of moral action "is a set of responsive holistic 'affections' that must be engaged [primed] in order to incite us to action" (Maddox, 1998, p. 40). This emphasis on affections as moral motivators of prosocial action is referred to as Wesley's moral affectional psychology (see Leffel, 2004; Maddox, 2004; Strawn & Leffel, 2001 for reviews).

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