Pride, Faith, and Fear

dEfininG faitH and faitH PraCtiCES

recent studies demonstrate an overlapping relationship between faith practices of individuals, family functioning, and the corporate faith of congregations. this study reports on the psychometric properties of the Christian faith Practices Scale (CfPS), which was created to empirically measure dykstra’s faith behaviors or “practices.” analysis of a large purposive sample (n=7,403) indicates ini...

Faith, Hope and Doubt

On Faith and the Fear of Fatality: A review of recent research on deities and death

Although speculations about the role of fear—and fear of death in particular— in the evolutionary and psychological origins of religion have been around for millennia, it is only in the last decade or so that systematic empirical investigations on the matter have been undertaken. In this paper, we review this recent body of correlational and experimental research to assess theoretical developme...

Faith healing and faith in healing.

Sarkar and Seshadri have presented an interesting paper in this issue on the ethical approach that a physician should take when faced with requests for faith healing (1). The paper describes four approaches that the physician can take. These are rejecting the request, keeping oneself detached from the issue, endorsing the request and trying to understand the practices concerned so as to make a ...

Pride and perseverance: the motivational role of pride.

Perseverance toward goals that carry short-term costs is an important component of adaptive functioning. The present experiments examine the role that the emotion pride may play in mediating such perseverance. Across 2 studies, pride led to greater perseverance on an effortful and hedonically negative task believed to be related to the initial source of pride. In addition, the causal efficacy o...