Schizophrenia is a devastating illness with a chronic and relapsing course. While Western countries may endorse, biological and psychosocial causes more commonly than supernatural causes, non-western cultures like Nigeria in contrast, tend to endorse supernatural causes. Belief in supernatural causes has been reported to have consequences for treatment seeking behavior. This study aimed to exam...

BACKGROUND Understanding perceptions of the causes of ill-health common in indigenous communities may help policy makers to design effective integrated primary health care strategies to serve these communities. This study explored the indigenous beliefs of ill-health causation among those living in the Tehuledere Woreda /district/ in North East Ethiopia from a socio-cultural perspective. METH...

Although tremendous effort has been put into synthetic libraries, most drugs on the market are still natural compounds or derivatives thereof. There are encyclopaedias of natural compounds, but the availability of these compounds is often unclear and catalogues from numerous suppliers have to be checked. To overcome these problems we have compiled a database of approximately 50,000 natural comp...

Below I use research in theoretical biology to shed light on the nature and function of supernatural cognition, and suggest some promising new paths of psychological inquiry these new understandings open. By supernatural cognition I mean beliefs, emotions, and practices relative to supernatural beings and powers like Yahweh, The Amida Buddha, Shiva, Jesus Christ, Zeus, grace, mana, soul, num, a...

We present a theory of the creativity of dreams as well as psychopathology of religious delusions with respect to production of fundamental forms of religious cognition-specifically supernatural agent (SA) cognitions. We suggest that dream cognitions are particularly efficient at producing highly memorable and impactful experiences with SAs because dreams involve three processes that are prereq...

Recent research shows that even preschoolers are skeptical; they frequently reject claims from other people when the claims conflict with their own perceptions and concepts. Yet, despite their skepticism, both children and adults come to believe in a variety of phenomena that defy their first-hand perceptions and intuitive conceptions of the world. In this review, we explore how children and ad...

Yōkai is an elusive category in Japanese history, folklore, and popular culture. It consists of mysterious phenomena that can exercise extraordinary agency their interactions with humans. Attempting to grapple this amorphous category, folklore studies has defined yōkai as malevolent supernatural beings. However, a survey these reveals most instances do not fit definition. This article discusses...