This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior, its subject cognition, emotion and the mental processes underlying them, pursued through controlled observation and experiment tested against measurable outcomes. Classified among the social sciences, its founding as an experimental discipline is generally dated to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory dedicated to studying the mind under controlled, repeatable conditions rather than through philosophical reflection alone.
For an atlas of religion and belief, psychology bears directly on some of the most personal claims a tradition makes, an experience of the divine, a vision, a state reached through prayer or meditation, a claim of a psychic or paranormal event. Its own clinical and parapsychological branches, already covered elsewhere as their own disciplines, study the psychology of religious experience and of psychic claims specifically, applying the parent field's controlled, evidence based method to phenomena a tradition itself describes in devotional rather than clinical terms.
That method is why the field matters here specifically. A reported religious experience is a real event in a person's mental life whichever account of its ultimate cause is correct, and psychology is the discipline equipped to study that mental life directly, on its own controlled and measurable terms, without needing to settle the metaphysical question first.