For two decades, published research has linked religious participation to various health outcomes. These include diminished risk according to overall and cause-specific morbidity and mortality and to indices of health status, symptomatology, and psychiatric illness, especially depression and anxiety. What may not be apparent to physicians exposed to this literature through featured news stories...

Infertility is a condition loaded with meaning spanning across biomedical, psychological, social, economic, cultural and religious spheres. Given its disruptive power over women's lives, it provides a unique lens through which issues of kinship, gender, sexuality, cosmology and religion can be examined. The paper presents the results of an ethnographic study of infertility in Central Nigeria. E...

The association between religiousness and depressive symptoms was examined with meta-analytic methods across 147 independent investigations (N = 98,975). Across all studies, the correlation between religiousness and depressive symptoms was -.096, indicating that greater religiousness is mildly associated with fewer symptoms. The results were not moderated by gender, age, or ethnicity, but the r...

Recent research has indicated a negative relation between the propensity for analytic reasoning and religious beliefs and practices. Here, we propose conflict detection as a mechanism underlying this relation, on the basis of the hypothesis that more-analytic people are less religious, in part, because they are more sensitive to conflicts between immaterial religious beliefs and beliefs about t...

Drawing upon James Carey’s ritual model of communication as a framework, we argue that rituals, especially religious rituals, are important resources for technology design. We suggest that a ritual view of ICT interaction represents an alternative and significant model for ICT development and evaluation, and that the observance of religious rituals affords researchers the opportunity to see cul...

The recent spate of attention that funders, administrators and researchers have given to undergraduates' religious and spiritual lives has led to new questions and ideas about the ways that religious identities and understandings influence campus life. It is likely, given this attention, that these studies will prompt new initiatives on numerous campuses that acknowledge and address students' r...

A new cognitive approach to religion is bringing fresh insights to our understanding of how religious concepts are maintained, acquired and used to motivate and direct actions. This approach suggests that seemingly extraordinary thoughts and behaviours can be supported by quite ordinary cognition and may thus be termed 'natural'. Simultaneously, this research is expanding the domain of concepts...

In two studies undergraduates' understanding of extraordinary capabilities was investigated using religious and secular contexts. Six stories assessed participants’ endorsement of anthropomorphic language to describe attention, physical power, perception, and presence of three agents: God, a human, and Qwore, an agent with the same powers as God. Participants attributed human-like limitations t...

Research and theory increasingly suggest that attendance at religious services is protective against premature mortality. However, prior studies are limited and do not extensively explore potential explanations for the relationship, especially in terms of religious beliefs and behaviors associated with service attendance. This study estimates the impact of service attendance on mortality in a n...

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, ...