OBJECTIVE To determine whether spiritual and religious identities predict complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use above and beyond other known influences such as gender, region of residence, social status, personality, health, and access to conventional medicine. METHODS Analyzing data from the 1995-1996 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (n=3032), this study...

Spirituality and religiousness have been shown to be highly prevalent in patients with schizophrenia. This study assesses the predictive value of helpful vs. harmful use of religion to cope with schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder at 3 years. From an initial cohort of 115 outpatients, 80% were reassessed for positive, negative and general symptoms, clinical global impression, social adap...

OBJECTIVES Gerotranscendence has been conceptualized as a potential development accompanying normal aging. Gerotranscendence is defined as a shift in metaperspective from a materialistic and pragmatic world view to a more cosmic and transcendent one. In the past decade, population-based studies have tested Tornstam's Gerotranscendence Scale. Its Cosmic Transcendence subscale, in particular, eme...

Previous investigators have proposed that various kinds of person-descriptive content--such as differences in attitudes or values, in sheer evaluation, in attractiveness, or in height and girth--are not adequately captured by the Big Five Model. We report on a rather exhaustive search for reliable sources of Big Five-independent variation in data from person-descriptive adjectives. Fifty-three ...

Prosocial behaviors are ubiquitous across societies. They emerge early in ontogeny and are shaped by interactions between genes and culture. Over the course of middle childhood, sharing approaches equality in distribution. Since 5.8 billion humans, representing 84% of the worldwide population, identify as religious, religion is arguably one prevalent facet of culture that influences the develop...

God's perceived closeness (GC) is greater when the attachment system is activated. This conclusion is based primarily on adult studies, but some findings suggest its validity also in childhood. Adult studies have shown GC to vary in relation to security of attachment, but child studies have been few and methodologically limited. In this study, we tested differences between securely and insecure...