Beyond belief

Psychology, including health psychology, frequently invokes the concept of belief but almost never defines it. Drawing upon scholarship associated with the ‘affective turn’, this paper argues that belief might usefully be understood as a structure of socialised feeling, contingently allied to discursive practices and positions. This conceptualisation is explained, and its implications for health psychology discussed with respect to research on religiosity and spirituality and debates about the value of social cognition models such as the Theory of Planned Behaviour.