Recent advances in our knowledge of mental illness have not lr*ade it any easier to reconcile this suffering with a belief in Cod. As long as all mental illness could be ascribed to evil spirits the Question of God's responsibility was not so great. The dichotomy of ^?d and the devil did give, as it were, a working solution to the problem although it did not give any final answer. The very idea of

OBJECTIVE The present study explored the role of the emotional experience of God (i.e., positive and negative God images) in the happiness of chronic pain (CP) patients. Framed in the transactional model of stress, we tested a model in which God images would influence happiness partially through its influence on disease interpretation as a mediating mechanism. We expected God images to have bot...

Cooperating with others often entails some sacrifice of one's own material interests. Many theories of reciprocity and cooperation thus assert a social-material tradeoff. In these theories, people reciprocate cooperation when they prioritize how they treat others and how others treat them. They do not reciprocate cooperation when they prioritize their own material well-being. We challenge this ...

Although kindness-based contemplative practices are increasingly employed by clinicians and cognitive researchers to enhance prosocial emotions, social cognitive skills, and well-being, and as a tool to understand the basic workings of the social mind, we lack a coherent theoretical model with which to test the mechanisms by which kindness-based meditation may alter the brain and body. Here, we...

PHILOSOPHY Ever since the time of Pascal men have feared that the 'God' worshipped by believers and the 'God' contemplated by philosophers were somehow different. The former was personal, historically active, slow to anger and plentiful in mercy: the latter was dubiously able to be described in personal terms at all, and infinite in such a way as to baffle the imagination. The 'God' of the form...

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people's willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effect was mediated by the perceived danger of a ri...

Anthropomorphism is a default strategy for making the unfamiliar familiar, but is it a uniform strategy? Do all dimensions of anthropomorphism “hang together”? We explored this question by involving adults (n = 99) in a speeded property-attribution task in which they decided, as quickly as possible, whether properties of two types— psychological and physiological—could be attributed to God. Par...