Spiritual Health
Choice, free will, and religion
Roy Baumeister, Isabelle Bauer & Stuary Lloyd
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, May 2010, Pages 67-82
Abstract:
Although free will has been defined in multiple, conflicting ways, the present approach analyzes it as a psychological capacity subsuming self-control, effortful choice, planning, and initiative. These capabilities are useful for making human social life and culture possible, but they depend on a limited resource and therefore often fall short of optimal levels. Religion may be helpful to individuals and society in part because it supports both the exercise of free will and the belief in it.
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Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?
Hagop Sarkissian, Amita Chatterjee, Felipe De Brigard, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols & Smita Sirker
Mind & Language, June 2010, Pages Pages 346-358
Abstract:
Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.
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Religious Conversion in Colonial Africa
Nathan Nunn
American Economic Review, May 2010, Pages 147-152
"Colonial Africa provides a natural laboratory to examine how an external intervention can have lasting impacts on people's beliefs and values. This study examines the effect of European missionary activities in colonial Africa on the subsequent evolution of culture, as measured by religious beliefs. The empirical results show that descendants of ethnic groups that experienced the greatest missionary contact are today more likely to self-identify as Christian. This correlation provides evidence that foreign missionaries altered the religious beliefs of Africans, and that these beliefs persist as they are passed on from parents to children. Put differently, the results show that historic events can have a lasting impact on culture."
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Religion, Health, and Psychological Well-Being
Morgan Green & Marta Elliott
Journal of Religion and Health, June 2010, Pages 149-163
Abstract:
This study compares the effects of religiosity on health and well-being, controlling for work and family. With 2006 GSS data, we assess the effects of religiosity on health and well-being, net of job satisfaction, marital happiness, and financial status. The results indicate that people who identify as religious tend to report better health and happiness, regardless of religious affiliation, religious activities, work and family, social support, or financial status. People with liberal religious beliefs tend to be healthier but less happy than people with fundamentalist beliefs. Future research should probe how religious identity and beliefs impact health and well-being.
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Theocracy and Autonomy in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy
Carlos Fraenkel
Political Theory, June 2010, Pages 340-366
Abstract:
According to both contemporary intuitions and scholarly opinion, autonomy is something specifically modern. It is certainly taken to be incompatible with religions like Islam and Judaism, if these are invested with political power. Both religions are seen as centered on a divine Law (sharî ‘a, viz., torah) which prescribes what we may and may not do, promising reward for obedience and threatening punishment for disobedience. Not we, but God makes the rules. This picture is in important ways misleading. There is, I argue, a substantive intellectual tradition, going back to Plato's Laws, which takes the purpose of a theocracy - a community governed by God through the intermediary of a divine Law - to be promoting rational autonomy, conceived as (1) the ability to rationally determine what is in one's best interest and (2) having the motivation to live accordingly. Among the most important representatives of this intellectual tradition are medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers.
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Beliefs about God, Psychiatric Symptoms, and Evolutionary Psychiatry
Kevin Flannelly, Kathleen Galek, Christopher Ellison & Harold Koenig
Journal of Religion and Health, June 2010, Pages 246-261
Abstract:
The present study analyzed the association between specific beliefs about God and psychiatric symptoms among a representative sample of 1,306 U.S. adults. Three pairs of beliefs about God served as the independent variables: Close and Loving, Approving and Forgiving, and Creating and Judging. The dependent variables were measures of General Anxiety, Depression, Obsessive-Compulsion, Paranoid Ideation, Social Anxiety, and Somatization. As hypothesized, the strength of participants' belief in a Close and Loving God had a significant salutary association with overall psychiatric symptomology, and the strength of this association was significantly stronger than that of the other beliefs, which had little association with the psychiatric symptomology. The authors discuss the findings in the context of evolutionary psychiatry, and the relevance of Evolutionary Threat Assessment Systems Theory in research on religious beliefs.
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Varieties of Moral Personality: Beyond the Banality of Heroism
Lawrence Walker, Jeremy Frimer & William Dunlop
Journal of Personality, June 2010, Pages 907-942
Abstract:
Four perspectives dominate thinking about moral heroism: One contends that moral action is primarily instigated by situational pressures, another holds that moral excellence entails the full complement of virtues, the third asserts a single superintending principle, and the fourth posits different varieties of moral personality. This research addresses these competing perspectives by examining the personalities of moral heroes. Participants were 50 national awardees for moral action and 50 comparison individuals. They responded to personality inventories and a life-review interview that provided a broadband assessment of personality. Cluster analysis of the moral exemplars yielded three types: a "communal" cluster was strongly relational and generative, a "deliberative" cluster had sophisticated epistemic and moral reasoning as well as heightened self-development motivation, and an "ordinary" cluster had a more commonplace personality. These contrasting profiles imply that exemplary moral functioning can take multifarious forms and arises from different sources, reflecting divergent person × situation interactions.
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Compassion: An Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review
Jennifer Goetz, Dacher Keltner & Emiliana Simon-Thomas
Psychological Bulletin, May 2010, Pages 351-374
Abstract:
What is compassion? And how did it evolve? In this review, we integrate 3 evolutionary arguments that converge on the hypothesis that compassion evolved as a distinct affective experience whose primary function is to facilitate cooperation and protection of the weak and those who suffer. Our empirical review reveals compassion to have distinct appraisal processes attuned to undeserved suffering; distinct signaling behavior related to caregiving patterns of touch, posture, and vocalization; and a phenomenological experience and physiological response that orients the individual to social approach. This response profile of compassion differs from those of distress, sadness, and love, suggesting that compassion is indeed a distinct emotion. We conclude by considering how compassion shapes moral judgment and action, how it varies across different cultures, and how it may engage specific patterns of neural activation, as well as emerging directions of research.
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The relationship between personal religious orientation and emotional intelligence
Chung-Chu Liu
Social Behavior and Personality, Spring 2010, Pages 461-467
Abstract:
Many researchers agree that an individual's religious orientation has a significant impact on personal attitudes and behaviors. The main purpose in this study was to investigate the relationship between personal religious orientation and emotional intelligence. A total of 497 valid copies out of 600 distributed questionnaires were collected from students and employees and were used to test the conceptual framework. It was found that intrinsic religious orientation has a significant positive correlation with emotional intelligence, but extrinsic religious orientation has a negative correlation with emotional intelligence. The theoretical and practical implications of religious orientation and emotional intelligence are discussed for both academics and practitioners.