Glossolalia (or "speaking in tongues") is an unusual mental state that has great personal and religious meaning. Glossolalia is experienced as a normal and expected behavior in religious prayer groups in which the individual appears to be speaking in an incomprehensible language. This is the first functional neuroimaging study to demonstrate changes in cerebral activity during glossolalia. The ...

Scholars of religion, including such luminaries as Durkheim, Rappaport, Turner, and Weber, have widely assumed that religion promotes intragroup trust among adherents. Recent applications of signaling theory to religious behavior among economists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary anthropologists further endorse this assumption. However, trust has not been rigorously or consistently define...

A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, beliefs and behaviors. The bulk of this research, however, draws from coded qualitative ethnographies rather than from standardized methods specifically designed to measure religious beliefs and behaviors. Psychological data sets that examine religious thought and behavior in controlled conditions t...

a r t i c l e i n f o Three hypotheses with the potential to provide information on the role of religiosity as a promotive and protective factor in early adolescence were tested. Adolescents (N = 166, M age = 13 years, 49% female, 49% European American, 45% African American) and mothers reported their own personal importance of religion and the frequency of their attendance of religious service...

Each month, many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Although research has found that this cycle influences women's mating preferences, we proposed that it might also change women's political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women's politics, ...

■ Abstract Although scholars tend to downplay the role of religion in political life, the vast majority of people in the world profess a strong allegiance to some spiritual faith. Secularization theory has long held that religion would become irrelevant, leading many comparative scholars to ignore this potentially significant variable. A recent resurgence in religious fundamentalism and “new re...