Patrick McNamara has made a thoughtful and nuanced contribution to a growing field centered on questions concerning brain activity required for, and involved in, religious life. In a field spanning the disciplines of neuroscience and religious studies it is often hard to find a perspective that has been thoroughly developed on both frontiers for the obvious reason that both are so expansive. Bu...

BACKGROUND Religious coping is known as a main resource influencing how individuals cope with the complications and stressors of chronic disease. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between religious coping and quality of life among hemodialysis patients. METHODS This cross-sectional study was conducted in Qom, Iran, from June 2012 to July 2013. Ninety-five end-s...

Patient-centered care is widely supported by physicians, but this wide-spread support potentially obscures the social patterning of clinical interactions. We know that patients often want religious/spiritual conversations in the context of medical care but the provision is infrequent. As there is regional variance in religiosity, a gap in the literature exists regarding whether patient populati...

BACKGROUND Beliefs surrounding pain during childbirth has biblical foundations that contribute to labour pain being viewed as a natural phenomenon. Contemporary health care promotes evidence-based labour pain management but the faith of the midwife may influence her midwifery practice regarding labour pain management. Therefore this study sought to gain in-depth insight into the experiences and...

In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons's theory of religion as a "hard-to-fake" sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual's commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facili...

BACKGROUND & PURPOSE Globally, diabetes is one of the most common non-contagious diseases resulting in severe complications. Fostered hope facilitates coping and improves self-care and one of the Factors affecting hope is religious beliefs. This research investigated the level of hope and its relationship with religious coping among Type 2 diabetes patients. MATERIAL & METHODS This correlatio...

In 1907 Freud (1941) was the first to note a similarity between religious and obsessive-compulsive behaviors, which he emphasized as the individual’s “private religion.” Other investigators (Akhtar et al., 1975) have suggested that obsessions and compulsions are culture-specific, with a crossover to religious behavior. Greenberg and Witztum (Greenberg and Witztum, 1994;Greenberg, 1984) discusse...

We examined the possible role of religious upbringing as a mediator of the shared environmental influences and as a moderator of the genetic influences on the risk of alcohol use initiation in a large population-based sample of Dutch adolescent and young adult twins (1967 twin pairs). There was not a significant association between religious participation and alcohol use initiation among Dutch ...

In this study, we examined associations among romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance, positive and negative religious coping, and marital adjustment in a community sample of 81 heterosexual couples. Multilevel modeling (MLM) for the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM; Cook & Kenny, 2005) was used to analyze data from both spouses. Romantic attachment avoidance was associated with less...

Numerous authors have suggested that religious belief has a positive association, possibly causal, with prosocial behavior. This article critiques evidence regarding this "religious prosociality" hypothesis from several areas of the literature. The extant literature on religious prosociality is reviewed including domains of charity, volunteering, morality, personality, and well-being. The exper...