In the present study, the authors examine the extent to which effects of individual religious involvement on self-assessed health are influenced by the religious context (i.e., religious involvement at the country level). The authors test their expectations using individual level data (N = 127,257) on 28 countries from the European Social Surveys (2002-2008). Results of multilevel analyses show...

Many psychologists and philosophers have suggested that religious ideas emerge because they are motivationally attractive. This paper attempts to support a version of the motivational thesis by relying on religious creeds as a source of historical evidence. This simple source of evidence indicates that the cultural evolution of religious ideas is partly a function of the motivational attractive...

Going to college has long been assumed to liberalize students' religious beliefs. Using longitudinal data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion, we compare change in the content of religious beliefs of those who do and do not attend college. We find that, in general, college students are no more likely to develop liberal religious beliefs than nonstudents. In some cases, collegians act...

We explored the emotional and attitudinal consequences of personal attitude-behavior discrepancies using a religious version of the hypocrisy paradigm. We induced cognitive dissonance in participants (n = 206) by making them feel hypocritical for advocating certain religious behaviors that they had not recently engaged in to their own satisfaction. In Experiment 1, this resulted in higher level...

A meta-analytic review of past research evaluated the link between religiosity and racism in the United States since the Civil Rights Act. Religious racism partly reflects intergroup dynamics. That is, a strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because tra...

Previous research has indicated that memories can be modified in conjunction with one’s attitudes, in particular, political beliefs. The current study extended this finding by focusing on the relationship between differing religious beliefs and false memories for news events. We predicted that religious people would be more inclined to remember fabricated news events positively depicting religi...

This study examines how religious activity is associated with risk behaviors, concurrently and developmentally among urban African American adolescents. Seven hundred and five African American youths were interviewed annually during high school. Retention rates for the study exceeded 90%. Frequency of religious activity, sexual intercourse, and alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use were assesse...

Title of Document: RELIGION AND DELINQUENCY IN THE CONTEXT OF RACE AND PLACE Dell-Autumn Wailani Witten Master of Arts 2006 Directed By: Professor Denise Gottfredson Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice This investigation examined the interaction between religion, race and urbanicity and their influence on delinquency. A sample of youth respondents ages 13-17 was drawn from ICPSR archiv...

Previous literature has widely demonstrated the physical and mental benefits of religiousness. However, how religiousness benefits health is not as well known. It has been proposed that self-regulation is the linking mechanism and the current study sought to confirm this theory. Furthermore, religious motivation has been found to have differential effects on a variety of outcomes. The current s...

BACKGROUND Research suggests that Chinese religious believers are more likely to commit suicide than those identifying as non-religious among rural young adults, contrary to findings in Western countries. However, one cannot conclude that religiosity is associated with elevated suicide risk without examining the effect of political and religious beliefs in a generally atheist country like China...