PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To investigate spiritual transformation among patients with cancer. DESIGN Longitudinal. SETTING A university medical center in the midwestern United States. SAMPLE 47 adult cancer survivors. METHODS Patients were asked about spirituality, religious and spiritual importance, religious coping, and spiritual gain and decline at baseline as well as nine months post-treat...

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a new theoretically based measure that would assess the full range of religious coping methods, including potentially helpful and harmful religious expressions. The RCOPE was tested on a large sample of college students who were coping with a significant negative life event. Factor analysis of the RCOPE in the college sample yielded factors ...

Defining C2 as “the establishment of common intent to achieve coordinated action”, Pigeau and McCann outline a spectrum of approaches for coordinating action, ranging from explicit control through to spontaneous emergent behaviour. They further emphasise the role of creativity in Command. We examine application of Pigeau and McCann’s concepts of C2 to military planning in a headquarters. Many c...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...

The current study attempted to examine the religious maturity of Hindu (N=1050), Christian (N=1073) and Muslim (N=1394) adolescents studying at secondary level in Pakistan. This research is based on the theory of religious orientations presented by Allpport (1950). Age universal I-E scale (revised version of ROS – Religious Orientation Scale) developed by Kirkpatrick (1988) and Maltby (1999) wa...

How are the Big Two personality dimensions of agency (e.g., competence, uniqueness, ambition) and communion (e.g., warmth, relatedness, morality) related to religiosity? A standard view assumes that communion encourages religiosity, whereas agency is independent of religiosity. Our model is more nuanced, taking into account the Big Two’s motivational base as well as culture: Because communal in...

The subject of religious experience has been marginalised in the social sciences. Although authors such as James (1903) have suggested that religious experience is pre-cultural and pre-cognitive, this paper argues against the perennialist position, suggesting instead that religious experience and its narration are both socially constructed. The ideological role of religious experience is discus...

This paper attempts to explain several empirical findings regarding religion. The main one is between religion and the fear of death. Some empirical evidence indicates moderately religious individuals fear death more than either atheists or extremely religious individuals. The model also explains the positive relationship often found between religious activity (e.g. church attendance) and age. ...

Religious attendance is an important element of activity for older Europeans, especially in more traditional countries. The aim of the analysis is to explore whether it could be an element contributing to active ageing as well as to assess differences between the religious activity of older individuals with and without multimorbidity defined as an occurrence of two or more illnesses. The analys...