Separating religion from cult

Who Benefits from Religion?

Many studies have documented the benefits of religious involvement. Indeed, highly religious people tend to be healthier, live longer, and have higher levels of subjective well-being. While religious involvement offers clear benefits to many, in this paper we explore whether it may also be detrimental to some. Specifically, we examine in detail the relation between religious involvement and sub...

From Religion to Reality:

Separating Appearance from Deformation

By representing images and image prototypes by linear subspaces spanned by “tangent vectors” (derivatives of an image with respect to translation, rotation, etc.), impressive invariance to known types of uniform distortion can be built into feedforward discriminators. We describe a new probability model that can jointly cluster data and learn mixtures of nonuniform, smooth deformation fields. O...

Psychiatric Testimony in "Cult"

Changes in political or religious beliefs among POWs and hostages have often been attributed to "brainwashing" or "coercive persuasion." The cases reported have usually involved people held involuntarily. Since the publication of DSM-Ill, the authors have noted frequent usage of the term "atypical dissociative disorder" in civil lawsuits by plaintiffs seeking damages from groups or cults they j...

The cult of mediocrity.

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/pps In several European countries, research progress is hindered by insufficient funding, lack of competing opportunities and the control of special interest groups, which disregard scientific merit and clinical value [1]. In Europe, these groups tend to control the mechanisms of academic promotion and feel threatened by talented and independent researchers ...