Previous research has indicated that the physical actions of prayer are especially salient for preschool-aged children, and children in this age range tend to associate prayer with communicating with God. As the context in which children learn about new concepts impacts on how children come to understand those concepts, and children are often introduced to the concept of God through prayer, the...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of intercessory prayer, a widely practiced complementary therapy, on cardiovascular disease progression after hospital discharge. PATIENTS AND METHODS In this randomized controlled trial conducted between 1997 and 1999, a total of 799 coronary care unit patients were randomized at hospital discharge to the intercessory prayer group or to the control group. In...

¶1 On Sunday morning, Ms. B. dials into Prodigy, then logs on to the Prayer Line, a bulletin board storing messages from around the world. She scans a list of the most recent entries: Learning how to lean; Let me pray for you; My father; My mother’s stroke; National day of prayer; Please pray; Prayer for health; Ralph needs prayer; The father’s heart.1 These are the supplications of a group tha...

Long recognized as a defi ning feature of religion, prayer, paradoxically, has received only sporadic empirical attention. Recent investigations in the U.S. and the Netherlands have sought to address this gap by exploring the topic of prayer in programmatic fashions, signifi cantly advancing the state of the art in terms of measurement of the practice of private prayer. The present paper fi rst...

Alcohol is frequently involved in psychological trauma and often used by individuals to reduce fear and anxiety. We examined the effects of alcohol on fear acquisition and extinction within a virtual environment. Healthy volunteers were administered alcohol (0.4g/kg) or placebo and underwent acquisition and extinction from different viewpoints of a virtual courtyard, in which the conditioned st...

We describe a system that uses laser rangefinders to track the positions of people in typical environments and then builds predictive models of the observed movement patterns and interactions between persons. We represent all human activity as detected by the laser rangefinder system as a probability distribution over the space of possible displacements. The assumption is that different activit...

Discomfort with the integration of spiritual activities into marital interventions may be a response by practitioners to the weakness of available conceptual frameworks. We offer a framework that allows for integration of prayer into marital interventions (educational or therapeutic), and argue that when culturally appropriate, prayer can serve multiple functions in interventions that are consi...