Social psychologists are increasingly interested in the growth of irreligion, defined by Lugo (2015) as identification with no particular religious affiliation. Findings that suggest that religion is a product of evolution have influenced this social psychological research, warranting the question: If religious tendencies were strictly a product of evolution, then how does one explain the pheno...

Many studies have examined the influence on sexual attitudes and behavior of religious belief (i.e., religious denomination) or religiosity (e.g., attendance at services, subjective importance of religion). However, few studies have examined the combined effects of religion and religiosity on sexual attitudes and behavior. This study examined such effects in a representative sample of 19,307 Au...

BACKGROUND Religious participation or belief may predict better mental health but most research is American and measures of spirituality are often conflated with well-being. AIMS To examine associations between a spiritual or religious understanding of life and psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses. METHOD We analysed data collected from interviews with 7403 people who participated in the thir...

A contemporary orientation of the hospital experience model must encompass the clients' religious-spiritual dimension. The objective of this paper is to share a previous experience, highlighting at least five reasons hospitals should invest in this direction, and an equal number of steps required to achieve it. In the first part, the text discourses about five reasons to invest in religious-spi...

Evidence for a relation between neuroticism and religion is scarce and inconsistent. The aims of the present study were to determine the association of religious upbringing with adult neuroticism scores and to examine the effect of religious upbringing on the heritability of neuroticism. As part of a longitudinal survey of twin families from the Netherlands Twin Register, data were collected on...

Priming has emerged as a valuable tool within the psychological study of religion, allowing for tests of religion's causal effect on a number of psychological outcomes, such as prosocial behavior. As the literature has grown, questions about the reliability and boundary conditions of religious priming have arisen. We use a combination of traditional effect-size analyses, p-curve analyses, and a...

This study critically examines the ways in which technological modernization and religion co-exist and mutually reinforce one another within the Singaporean context. Interviews with religious leaders of a diverse set of faiths in Singapore about how they understand the role of information technology in religious practice reveal a broad-based acceptance of the Internet and other information tech...

Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individua...

Sociologists know surprisingly little about the religious lives of adolescents in the United States. This article begins to redress that unfortunate lack of knowledge by examining descriptive findings on adolescent religious participation from three recent, reputable national surveys of American youth. We present descriptive statistics on three fundamental aspects of youth religious participati...

Revered in some cultures but persecuted by most others, epilepsy patients have, throughout history, been linked with the divine, demonic, and supernatural. Clinical observations during the past 150 years support an association between religious experiences during (ictal), after (postictal), and in between (interictal) seizures. In addition, epileptic seizures may increase, alter, or decrease re...