Increasing evidence suggests that religious practice induces systematic biases in attentional control. We used Navon's global-local task to compare attentional bias in Taiwanese Zen Buddhists and Taiwanese atheists; two groups brought up in the same country and culture and matched with respect to race, intelligence, sex, and age. Given the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for the physical and so...

Our recent work showed that self-trait judgment is associated with increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) in non-religious Chinese, but in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) in Chinese Christians. The current work further investigated neural substrates of self-referential processing in Chinese Buddhists. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanne...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Religious belief is an important aspect that influences the life of a patient, especially in Asia. We aim to compare the quality of death in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) between Buddhists and Muslims from the perspectives of the relatives of the patients and the nurses and physicians. SUBJECTS AND METHODS This was a cohort study of critically ill patients who died after ad...

In my efforts to synthesize Buddhist and psychodynamic psychologies of mind, the inner experience of emptiness has emerged as the most beguiling and yet the most treacherous subject common to both fields. There is confusion within psychodynamic theory about what constitutes emptiness, there is confusion within Buddhist theory about what constitutes emptiness, and there is certainly confusion am...

Research suggests that religious individuals are more prejudiced against sexual minorities (Herek, 1987). However, the Golden Rule, a universal concept embedded in many religions, emphasizes the importance of treating others with compassion. The present study examined how priming the Golden Rule influenced Buddhists‟ and Christians‟ attitudes toward gay people. We primed participants with Golde...