Existential neuroscience: a proximate explanation of religion as flexible meaning and palliative

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Religious belief has been shown to offer substantial benefits to its adherents, including improved well-being and health. We suggest that these benefits might be explained, at least in part, from a ''motivated meaning-making'' perspective. This model holds that people are motivated to create and sustain meaning (i.e., a sense of coherency between beliefs, goals, and perceptions of the environment, which provides individuals with the feeling that the world is an orderly place), and that religious beliefs buffer the distress associated with disruptions to meaning, thus leading to decreases in distress. We further propose that religion's palliative attributes can be measured at the level of the brain, specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which produces a ''distress signal'' upon the detection of errors, conflict, and expectancy violation. Using a social neu-roscience paradigm, we investigate four main predictions that arise from this model: (1) religion should be associated with activation in the ACC; (2) religion should decrease activation in the ACC; (3) this attenuation of ACC activity should be related to religion's ability to buffer bodily states of distress, and not to decreases in motivation, attention, or control; (4) religion should have these effects because it provides meaning and thus buffers people from uncertainty. All predictions were supported, thus providing evidence, at the neural level, for the motivated meaning-making model's account of the salutary properties of religion. Introduction God is not great. At least that's what the patriarchs of the New Atheist movement would like us to believe. According to them and their myriad adherents, organized religion is a virus that infects the modern world (Dawkins, 2006; Harris, 2004; Hitchens, 2007). They maintain that the ''god hypothesis'' has failed, that predictions derived from religion have been falsified, and that …