Is Faith an Emotion?: Faith as a Meaning-Making Affective Process: An Example From Breast Cancer Patients

To understand the meaning of religious faith within the context of theobiology, this study reports on the findings of a study of breast cancer (BC) patients and how they defined faith with emotion words and reported via open-ended short narratives how religious faith helped them in coping with their BC. When defining faith, BC patients preferred positive emotion words (82.9%) over negative emotion words (17%). Still, the fact that negative emotion words were used at all indicates the need to understand religious faith as a construct that encompasses negative as well as positive emotions. BC patients confirmed the historical views of Thomas Aquinas on the role of emotions in religious faith.