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- August 19, 2010
- 05:33 PM
- 48 views
Young evangelicals are greener... but no more liberal
During the last US presidential campaign, there was a flurry of excitement when pundits caught hold of the idea that some young Christian evangelicals might possibly vote for Obama (despite the fact that he is, apparently, a Muslim, or perhaps not even a Christian, or something). This would not be so surprising. After all, there is nothing set in stone about what the political and even moral beliefs of an evangelical should be. There would be nothing in principle to stand in the way of a bit of ........ Read more »
Smith, B., & Johnson, B. (2010) The Liberalization of Young Evangelicals: A Research Note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(2), 351-360. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01514.x
- August 17, 2010
- 03:31 PM
- 50 views
Praying and staying together - and away from those infidels
Here's a conundrum for you. In the USA, religious couples report higher satisfaction with their relationship. African-American couples are more religious than white couples. Yet African-American couples report lower relationship satisfaction than White couples. What's going on here?
The answer, according to a recent analysis of the National Survey of Religion and Family Life (NSRFL), is that African-Americans would have even worse relationships if it weren't for their religion.
The graphic........ Read more »
Ellison, C., Burdette, A., & Bradford Wilcox, W. (2010) The Couple That Prays Together: Race and Ethnicity, Religion, and Relationship Quality Among Working-Age Adults. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(4), 963-975. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00742.x
- August 12, 2010
- 04:44 PM
- 67 views
Praying for abstinence
Religious people are less likely to drink heavily. However, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. Is it that turning to god help people stay off the demon drink, or is it that hard-core party animals are less likely to be religious?
These questions crop up a lot in studies of religion, but there are a couple of ways round them. Basically, you can look at what happens over time (does being religious at the start of the year predict alcohol consumption at the end), or you can encourage people t........ Read more »
Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Marks, L., & Stillman, T. (2010) Invocations and intoxication: Does prayer decrease alcohol consumption?. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 24(2), 209-219. DOI: 10.1037/a0018746
- August 9, 2010
- 05:25 PM
- 80 views
Why psychotic patients with religious delusions are harder to cure.
We all hold beliefs that are not provable, and defining when these beliefs cross the line and become psychotic delusions is not easy. It's clear that such a line does exist, however: every town has its share of people whose religious beliefs fall sufficiently far outside the conventional that they are declared psychotic.
In popular imagination, at least, psychotic delusions often have a religious component. In reality, many psychotic delusions are not religious. However, many delusions involve ........ Read more »
Mohr, S., Borras, L., Betrisey, C., Pierre-Yves, B., Gilliéron, C., & Huguelet, P. (2010) Delusions with Religious Content in Patients with Psychosis: How They Interact with Spiritual Coping. Psychiatry: Interpersonal , 73(2), 158-172. DOI: 10.1521/psyc.2010.73.2.158
- August 3, 2010
- 02:25 PM
- 80 views
Why are there more Christian congregations where there is more crime?
Take a middle-American US city – a fairly typical city with the usual mix of rich and poor, downtown and suburban, black and white. Indianapolis, let’s say. Which areas do you think would have the highest levels of crime?
Well, the poor areas of course. No surprises there. Downtown areas and those area with low population density are also at risk – probably a result of increased opportunities. Racially mixed areas have higher level of theft and burglary, although not violent crime. And t........ Read more »
Desmond, S., Kikuchi, G., & Morgan, K. (2010) Congregations and Crime: Is the Spatial Distribution of Congregations Associated with Neighborhood Crime Rates?. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(1), 37-55. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01491.x
- July 17, 2010
- 05:41 PM
- 123 views
How are British kids doing these days?
British society, like that of most industrialized nations, has gone through enormous changes in recent decades. But it's hard to get objective data on what the impact has been on the people living there.
Which is why I was interested to see a recent study by Stephen Collishaw, of Cardiff University, and colleagues. They compared data from two studies, one in 1986 and one in 2006, that asked adolescents (aged 16-17) about their state of mind. Whether they felt anxious, depressed, worried, irrita........ Read more »
Collishaw, S., Maughan, B., Natarajan, L., & Pickles, A. (2010) Trends in adolescent emotional problems in England: a comparison of two national cohorts twenty years apart. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(8), 885-894. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02252.x
- July 13, 2010
- 05:06 PM
- 98 views
Xanax redux
There's a little corner of your brain - the anterior cingulate cortex - that's thought to play a role in monitoring errors. The electrical signals that flow from this part of the brain ramp up when the mind is challenged with conflicting information, an effect called 'error response negativity', or ERN. In short, ERN represents that anxious, uneasy feeling you sometimes get when you've made a mistake.
Back in 2009 Michael Inzlicht, at the University of Toronto in Canada, found that religious pe........ Read more »
Michael Inzlicht, & Alexa M. Tullett. (2010) Reflecting on God: Religious Primes Can Reduce Neurophysiological Response to Errors. Psychological Science. info:/10.1177/0956797610375451
- July 10, 2010
- 05:14 PM
- 154 views
Forget your worries with religious zealotry
When animals are made to feel anxious and frustrated, they often turn to displacement activities - goals which may be irrelevant, but which they can at least achieve. Rats may run so eagerly on wheel that they starve themselves to death. Dogs may lick themselves so repetitively that they develop skin lesions. But what do humans do?
One thing we can do, according to new research by Ian McGregor and colleagues at York University, Toronto, Canada, is to become more fervent in our pursuit of cheris........ Read more »
McGregor I, Nash K, & Prentice M. (2010) Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 99(1), 148-61. PMID: 20565192
- July 7, 2010
- 01:12 PM
- 125 views
What values motivate the non-religious in the UK?
Most research on religion is done in the US, a country which is something of an outlier among modernised nations because of the importance of religion in daily life. So, for example, the non-religious in the US tend to be 'disagreeable' (meaning that they are nonconformist and prefer to go their own way). But is this something general about the non-religious, or does it simply tell us something about what it takes to be openly non-religious in the USA?
So a recent analysis of the values of the ........ Read more »
Pepper, M., Jackson, T., & Uzzell, D. (2010) A Study of Multidimensional Religion Constructs and Values in the United Kingdom. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(1), 127-146. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01496.x
- June 27, 2010
- 04:30 PM
- 153 views
If you ostracise them, will they come?
Humans, like all other primates, are obsessed by their peer group of colleagues and acquaintances. And that's for good reason because, for primates, being excluded from the group can be lethal.
So what do you do if you find yourself being ostracised? Well, for humans at least, one option is to turn to religion. Religion, after all, provides a ready-made community for those who conform to the group ideology – and even for those who don't, religion offers a virtual world of supernatural buddies........ Read more »
Aydin, N., Fischer, P., & Frey, D. (2010) Turning to God in the Face of Ostracism: Effects of Social Exclusion on Religiousness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(6), 742-753. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210367491
- June 9, 2010
- 05:41 PM
- 206 views
Religion and the case of the disappearing right-brain
Studies of brain damage give a unique insight into how the mind works. If your behaviour changes when a specific lump is taken out, then that's pretty good evidence for the function of that particular lump.
So what happens when half your brain starts to rot away? Dennis Chan, a neurologist at the Institute of Neurology in London, decided to find out.
'Right temporal lobe atrophy' is a rare condition in which a major part of the right side of the brain simply withers away. You can see a particu........ Read more »
Chan, D., Anderson, V., Pijnenburg, Y., Whitwell, J., Barnes, J., Scahill, R., Stevens, J., Barkhof, F., Scheltens, P., Rossor, M.... (2009) The clinical profile of right temporal lobe atrophy. Brain, 132(5), 1287-1298. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awp037
- June 6, 2010
- 05:26 PM
- 156 views
What did your mommy and daddy believe?
Young adults in the USA are more likely than ever before to tell pollsters that they don't see themselves as 'being' of any particular religion - they are unaffiliated. The data are clear, but the reason for this shift is not.
It might simply be their age. Maybe they will be more likely to identify with a religion when they're older. Alternatively, there could be an uptick in the numbers of people who are leaving religion - for good.
Or maybe it's a snowball effect. More than ever before, Amer........ Read more »
Schwadel, P. (2010) Period and Cohort Effects on Religious Nonaffiliation and Religious Disaffiliation: A Research Note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(2), 311-319. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01511.x
- June 3, 2010
- 05:05 PM
- 388 views
Children can tell the difference between science and religion
Paul Harris, a psychologist at Harvard University, is interested in how children learn to differentiate between different kinds of knowledge. In his latest study, he's teamed up with two Spanish psychologists to unpick the beliefs of young, Catholic children.
These 10-12 year olds have a pretty firm conviction in both God and the soul. They also believe (slightly more strongly, in fact) in invisible scientific entities, like oxygen and germs. What the team wanted to know was whether they believ........ Read more »
Guerrero, S., Enesco, I., & Harris, P. (2010) Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10(1), 123-151. DOI: 10.1163/156853710X497202
- May 31, 2010
- 05:36 PM
- 194 views
Did fornicating Farm Girls boost the rise of atheism in Britain?
These days, Britain is one of the most atheistic countries around. It wasn't always like that, of course, but one of the problems with trying to work out how the present state of affairs came about is that there are very few statistics on religion the stretch back far enough.
Stepping into the breach is Steven Bruce and Tony Glendinning, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. They've put together a time-series from data collected by the Methodists Churches, who have been among the most rigo........ Read more »
Bruce, S, & Glendinning, T. (2010) When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause. The British Journal of Sociology, 61(1), 107-126. info:/
- May 28, 2010
- 05:46 PM
- 263 views
Protestants tempt fate, but atheists don't!
Apparently, some people think that talking or merely thinking about an event can actually bring it about. To me, that's incomprehensible. When I was young, I assumed that the concept of "tempting fate' was a poetic metaphor. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that some people take it literally!
Jonathan Abramowitz and colleagues, at the University of North Carolina, have done a nice little study into the differences between Protestants and nonbelievers in attitudes towards tempting fate. Tec........ Read more »
Berman, N., Abramowitz, J., Pardue, C., & Wheaton, M. (2010) The relationship between religion and thought–action fusion: Use of an in vivo paradigm. Behaviour Research and Therapy. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2010.03.021
- May 25, 2010
- 04:55 PM
- 204 views
Science can't prove that! How rejecting evolution leads to rejecting science
Recent studies have shown that, at least in the USA, science and religion don't really mix. Religious people tend to have worse understanding of science, and scientists are, of course, far less religious that the general population (probably because they start out that way, before they ever get to university).
We also know that religious people are much more likely to reject evolution. You think there's a connection here? Well, no doubt. But new research suggests that the connection runs deeper........ Read more »
Munro, G. (2010) The Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40(3), 579-600. DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00588.x
- May 22, 2010
- 05:43 PM
- 179 views
Lessons from the Indonesian financial crisis of 1998
The Indonesian Financial Crisis of 1998 was disastrous for the families caught up in it. The rupiah devalued by 80%, and food prices more than doubled. Worst affected was the price of rice, which rose by 280%.
As a result, the monthly surplus that the average family had to spend on non-food items dropped by two-thirds - from $7.34 to $2.64.
In the period spanning the crisis, the Indonesian Central Statistics Office ran a series of surveys - the Hundred Villages Survey - which followed over 100........ Read more »
Chen, D. (2010) Club Goods and Group Identity: Evidence from Islamic Resurgence during the Indonesian Financial Crisis. Journal of Political Economy, 118(2), 300-354. DOI: 10.1086/652462
- May 18, 2010
- 05:52 PM
- 170 views
Will the financial crisis turn people to religion?
Well, we have a global financial crisis. We also know that religion is a source of solace for a lot of people. So will the financial crisis mean boom times for religion?
The answer is probably yes, but not in a way that's straightforward. That's the message from two new studies, one in the US (which is the topic of this post) and one in Indonesia (which I'll write up in the next post). The Indonesian one is particularly interesting because it's not often we get insights into the role of religi........ Read more »
Bradshaw, M., & Ellison, C. (2010) Financial Hardship and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Buffering Effects of Religion☆. Social Science . DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.015
- May 10, 2010
- 04:49 PM
- 1,510 views
Who's to blame for the financial crisis
Astute observers will have noticed that there's been something of a crisis in the financial world over the past couple of years. The EU's just coughed up €500 billion in the latest an effort to stem the panic... or, alternatively, to fend off the predators.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. Is the crisis just one of those things - part of a natural economic cycle that is beyond anyone's ability to predict or control? Or is it a result of moral or intellectual failures among those who........ Read more »
Leiser, D., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Benita, R. (2010) Human foibles or systemic failure—Lay perceptions of the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Journal of Socio-Economics, 39(2), 132-141. DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2010.02.013
- May 8, 2010
- 02:12 AM
- 217 views
Where Mormons Thrive
Among the great American exports to the rest of the world, there are a bewildering variety of religious cults and sects. Not all have take root, but the most successful - groups like the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Seventh Day Adventists - now number in the millions.
Their success is mostly down to prosyletisation, in addition to any endogenous growth (due to fertility) that was the topic of the previous post.
So why are they so successful, and perhaps more importantly where ar........ Read more »
Cragun, R., & Lawson, R. (2010) The Secular Transition: The Worldwide Growth of Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists. Sociology of Religion. DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srq022
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