PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To investigate spiritual transformation among patients with cancer. DESIGN Longitudinal. SETTING A university medical center in the midwestern United States. SAMPLE 47 adult cancer survivors. METHODS Patients were asked about spirituality, religious and spiritual importance, religious coping, and spiritual gain and decline at baseline as well as nine months post-treat...

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a new theoretically based measure that would assess the full range of religious coping methods, including potentially helpful and harmful religious expressions. The RCOPE was tested on a large sample of college students who were coping with a significant negative life event. Factor analysis of the RCOPE in the college sample yielded factors ...

Building on the idea that religiosity and spirituality are related yet distinct phenomena, this study examined whether formal religious participation and daily spiritual experiences are independently and equally associated with diverse dimensions of psychological well-being (negative affect, positive affect, purpose in life, positive relations with others, personal growth, self-acceptance, envi...

The establishment of reliable and authoritative figures on ethnic, religious, and language groups plays a prominent role in efforts to fight discrimination and foster individual human rights as well as minority group rights. However, there is no consensus among statisticians, demographers and social scientists at large concerning standards to be used in the identification of minority groups and...

a liquid suspension of Bacillus anthracis was aerosolized from the roof of an eight-story building in Kameido, Tokyo, Japan, by the religious group Aum Shinrikyo. During 1999 to 2001, microbiologic tests were conducted on a liquid environmental sample originally collected during the 1993 incident. Nonencapsulated isolates of B. anthracis were cultured from the liquid. Multiple-locus, variable-n...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...

The current study attempted to examine the religious maturity of Hindu (N=1050), Christian (N=1073) and Muslim (N=1394) adolescents studying at secondary level in Pakistan. This research is based on the theory of religious orientations presented by Allpport (1950). Age universal I-E scale (revised version of ROS – Religious Orientation Scale) developed by Kirkpatrick (1988) and Maltby (1999) wa...

How are the Big Two personality dimensions of agency (e.g., competence, uniqueness, ambition) and communion (e.g., warmth, relatedness, morality) related to religiosity? A standard view assumes that communion encourages religiosity, whereas agency is independent of religiosity. Our model is more nuanced, taking into account the Big Two’s motivational base as well as culture: Because communal in...

The subject of religious experience has been marginalised in the social sciences. Although authors such as James (1903) have suggested that religious experience is pre-cultural and pre-cognitive, this paper argues against the perennialist position, suggesting instead that religious experience and its narration are both socially constructed. The ideological role of religious experience is discus...