Compared to life in the 1950s, today's teenagers become physically mature earlier and marry later. There is a steady increase in the proportion of adolescents having sexual intercourse, and in the percentage doing so at younger ages. Moreover, almost all teens experiment with some type of sex, with largely similar patterns of sexual activity among males and females, and young people from dif...

Philosophers today are deeply divided by issues of a kind that can be described as "metaepistemological" -issues concerning the concepts and methodology appropriate for a philosophical investigation of human knowledge. In thinking about some of these controversial issues it seems to me helpful to draw a distinction between two kinds of epistemic merit intrinsic and instrumental. There are many ...

The author regards as "enemies" of parapsychological research (1) those critics who confuse parapsychology with popular superstition, (2) those parapsychologists who know all the pieces of evidence for the reality of psi effects but who lack the capacity to integrate and to evaluate that evidence as a whole, and (3) those professional psychics whose faltering attempts to apply psi for profit gi...

The four principles approach to medical ethics plus specification is used in this paper. Specification is defined as a process of reducing the indeterminateness of general norms to give them increased action guiding capacity, while retaining the moral commitments in the original norm. Since questions of method are central to the symposium, the paper begins with four observations about method in...

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 ...

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...