BACKGROUND Infertility is a reproductive health problem and its prevalence is increasing in developing countries. This problem has some significant effects on the sexual behaviors of infertile women, especially during infertility treatment periods. Discovering the existing beliefs in the field of sexual and reproductive health and also determining the misconceptions would define the educational...

OBJECTIVE Religious practices among adults are associated with more 12-step participation which, in turn, is linked to better treatment outcomes. Despite recommendations for adolescents to participate in mutual-help groups, little is known about how religious practices influence youth 12-step engagement and outcomes. This study examined the relationships among lifetime religiosity, during-treat...

In this paper we review the essential concepts of representing brain and mind behaviors as computer programs. First, we review the essence of neural networks, rule-based reasoning systems, and case-based reasoning systems and summarize the progress of these representations to date. Next, and more importantly, we ask a series of interrelated questions from a religious point of view: Is there roo...

Many challenges confront evolutionary scholars of religion. The origins and adaptive value of religion and the conditions that selected for its evolution are difficult to discern. Patterns of religious behavior, like other areas of human social behavior, have undergone significant change over our evolutionary history. Evans-Pritchard1 argued that dramatic historical changes in religious behavio...

BACKGROUND Cigarette smoking causes serious health, economic, and social problems throughout the world. Religious involvement is known to be an important predictor of health behaviors and substance use. The present study examines the correlation between religious involvements and tobacco use, and explores connections between religiosity and tobacco use in Muslims and non-Muslims in Western Chin...

In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. The existing literature documents that charitable giving is very responsive to tax subsidies, but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies. This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious particip...

We study two distinct effects of local religions on organizational risk-taking: religious beliefs share a common aversion to pure risk but have diverging attitudes toward speculative risk. As predicted, we find that mutual fund managers’ speculative risk-taking behaviors vary with specific local religious beliefs – funds in low-Protestant (or high-Catholic) areas have higher return volatilities...

Previous literature on religion and sexual behavior has focused on narrow definitions of religiosity, including religious affiliation, religious participation, or forms of religiousness (e.g., intrinsic religiosity). Trends toward more permissive premarital sexual activity in the North American Christian-Judeo religion support the secularization hypothesis of religion, which posits an increasin...

Chaves (2010) argues that much of the work in the sociology of religion is susceptible to the religious congruence fallacy—the tendency to assume consistency between religious beliefs and one’s attitudes and behaviors across situations when they are in fact highly variable. We build on and extend this argument by focusing on intersecting group identities as a mechanism for identifying such inco...