In the past twenty years there has been increasing attention given to the relationships between various dimensions of religiosity and mental health. By now several thousand studies have been conducted demonstrating positive associations between the two (Koenig, King and Carson 2012). On balance those who are more religious have better indices of mental health. The vast majority have been cross-...

The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is a measure of the centrality, importance or salience of religious meanings in personality that has been applied yet in more than 100 studies in sociology of religion, psychology of religion and religious studies in 25 countries with in total more than 100,000 participants. It measures the general intensities of five theoretical defined core dimensions...

Religious studies of fertility typically focus on the effect of religious affiliation on fertility; the role of religiosity in determining fertility remains overlooked. Meanwhile, most studies focus on studying female fertility; whether religion and religiosity have significantly different impacts on men’s and women’s fertility rarely has been examined. To fill these gaps, this study uses data ...

Although previous studies have found a protective association between attendance at religious services and depression, the extent to which this association is driven by depressed persons' dropping out of religious activities is not clear. The authors examined whether early onset of a major depressive episode (MDE) predicted a subsequent decrease in religious service attendance. Data came from 3...

Controlled intervention studies offer considerable promise to better understand relationships and possible mechanisms between spiritual and religious factors and health. Studies examining spiritually augmented cognitive-behavioral therapies, forgiveness interventions, different meditation approaches, 12-step fellowships, and prayer have provided some evidence, albeit modest, of efficacy in impr...

A common finding across many cultures has been that religious people behave more prosocially than less (or non-) religious people. Numerous priming studies have demonstrated that the activation of religious concepts via implicit and explicit cues (e.g., 'God,' 'salvation,' among many others) increases prosociality in religious people. However, the factors underlying such findings are less clear...

In ‘secular’ Western societies, religious topics permeate media texts of books, films, series and games and such texts even inform several religious-spiritual movements. Critically expanding on theories about ‘fiction-based religion’, ‘invented religion’ or ‘hyper-real religion’, this article studies if, how and why players of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of...

Recent studies have found that activating religious cognition by priming techniques can enhance prosocial behavior, arguably because religious concepts carry prosocial associations. But many of these studies have primed multiple concepts simultaneously related to the sacred. We argue here that religion and God are distinct concepts that activate distinct associations. In particular, we examine ...

Numerous authors have suggested that religious belief has a positive association, possibly causal, with prosocial behavior. This article critiques evidence regarding this "religious prosociality" hypothesis from several areas of the literature. The extant literature on religious prosociality is reviewed including domains of charity, volunteering, morality, personality, and well-being. The exper...