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 ...

The present study investigates the processes by which essentialist beliefs about religious categories develop. Children (ages 5 and 10) and adults (n = 350) from 2 religious groups (Jewish and Christian), with a range of levels of religiosity, completed switched-at-birth tasks in which they were told that a baby had been born to parents of 1 religion but raised by parents of another religion. R...

PURPOSE A community and faith-based intervention with elderly persons and their adult children involving religious, medical, and academic communities is described. DESIGN AND METHODS Lifestyle changes and individual and corporate forms of spirituality were affirmed using an expanded Rowe and Kahn model of successful aging. Faculty from academic, medical, state, and religious institutions pres...

abstract background: postpartum blues is a transient change of moods occurring in the first few days after delivery. the present study aimed to investigate the effect of religious doctrines on postpartum blues in primiparous women. materials and methods: in this randomized controlled tria1, 84 primiparous women who had average or weak religious attitude were randomly divided into intervention a...

To advance knowledge in the study of spirituality and physical health, we examined sociodemographic, behavioral, and attitudinal correlates of self-perceptions of spirituality. Participants were a nationally representative sample of 1,422 adult respondents to the 1998 General Social Survey. They were asked, among other things, to rate themselves on the depth of their spirituality and the depth ...

The majority of the world’s Muslim population follows the Sunni branch of Islam, and approximately 10-15% of all Muslims follow the Shiite (Shi‘ite, Shi‘a, Shia) branch. Shiite populations constitute a majority in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan. There are also significant Shiite populations in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen. Sunnis and Shiites share ...

The international religious data in the World Christian Database (WCD), and its print predecessor, the World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE) have been used frequently in academic studies and the popular press. Scholars have raised questions about the WCD’s estimates categories, and potential bias, but the data have not yet been systematically assessed. We test the reliability of the WCD by compari...

Technological advances have made it increasingly easy for candidates and campaigns to target particular messages to specific groups of voters; however, there has been little attention paid to whether targeted pandering to groups actually works. In this paper, we use a survey experiment to examine whether and the extent to which targeted appeals to narrow groups provide candidates with an advant...