Abstract The 2001 (first) edition of this Handbook was a comprehensive review of history, research, and discussions on religion and health through the year 2000. The Appendix listed 1,200 separate quantitative studies on religion and health each rated in quality on 0–10 scale, followed by about 2,000 references and an extensive index for rapid topic identification. The 2012 (second) edition of the Handbook systematically updated the research from 2000 to 2010, with the number of quantitative studies then reaching the thousands. This 2023 (third) edition is the most scientifically rigorous edition to date, covering the best research published through 2021 with an emphasis on prospective studies and randomized controlled trials. Beginning with a Foreword by Dr. Howard K. Koh, former US Assistant Secretary for Health for the Department of Health and Human Services, this nearly 600,000-word volume examines almost every aspect of health, reviewing past and more recent research on the relationship between religion and health outcomes. Furthermore, nearly all of its 34 chapters conclude with clinical and community applications, making this text relevant to both healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses, social workers, rehabilitation therapists, counselors, psychologists, sociologists, etc.) and clergy (community clergy, chaplains, pastoral counselors, etc.). The book’s extensive Appendix focuses on the best studies, describing each study in a single line, allowing researchers to quickly locate the existing research. It should not be surprising that for the past two decades the Handbook has been the most cited of all references on religion and health. 

Handbook of Religion and Health

Authoritarianism has been an important explanatory concept for more than 60 years and a powerful predictor of social, political, and intergroup attitudes and behaviour. An important impediment to research on authoritarianism has been the length of the measures available, particularly with the contemporary emphasis on the need for social research to use larger, more representative samples and measure multiple constructs across multiple domains. We therefore developed a six-item Very Short Authoritarianism (VSA) scale that equally represented the three content subdimensions and two directions of wording of Altemeyer’s widely used Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. Over four samples (N = 1,601) from three countries the VSA scale showed satisfactory internal consistency and the expected hierarchical factor structure with three primary factors loading on a single higher-order factor. Additionally, the scale predicted variables such as nationalism, ethnocentrism, political orientation, political party/candidate support, attitudes towards ingroups or outgroups and anti-minority bias at moderate to strong levels with effects very close to those obtained for much longer established measures of RWA (including Altemeyer’s scale). The VSA scale also showed clearly better reliability and validity than a short measure of authoritarian parental values that has been used to measure authoritarianism.

/pdf/investigating-right-wing-authoritarianism-with-a-very-short-3oc1uygrfr.pdf

Investigating Right Wing Authoritarianism With a Very Short Authoritarianism Scale

Intergroup contact is among the most effective ways to improve intergroup attitudes. Research examining whether the effects of contact are contingent on individual differences is limited, however. The authors test a dual process model perspective of individual differences in contact and prejudice. Their model predicts that intergroup contact should be particularly effective for people high in right-wing authoritarianism, but not those high in social dominance orientation, because these ideological attitudes are driven by different underlying motivational goals. The authors confirm these hypotheses in longitudinal (N = 805) and cross-sectional (N = 1,343) national probability samples. They also isolate perceived social threat, but not competitive threat, as a mediator for the interaction of right-wing authoritarianism and contact on prejudice. The authors elaborate on the individual difference mechanisms that facilitate and inhibit the effects of intergroup contact on prejudice and discuss how these relati...

Differential Effects of Intergroup Contact for Authoritarians and Social Dominators: A Dual Process Model Perspective

Although human existence is enveloped by ideologies, remarkably little is understood about the relationships between ideological attitudes and psychological traits. Even less is known about how cognitive dispositions-individual differences in how information is perceived and processed- sculpt individuals' ideological worldviews, proclivities for extremist beliefs and resistance (or receptivity) to evidence. Using an unprecedented number of cognitive tasks (n = 37) and personality surveys (n = 22), along with data-driven analyses including drift-diffusion and Bayesian modelling, we uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs. Cognitive and personality assessments consistently outperformed demographic predictors in accounting for individual differences in ideological preferences by 4 to 15-fold. Furthermore, data-driven analyses revealed that individuals' ideological attitudes mirrored their cognitive decision-making strategies. Conservatism and nationalism were related to greater caution in perceptual decision-making tasks and to reduced strategic information processing, while dogmatism was associated with slower evidence accumulation and impulsive tendencies. Religiosity was implicated in heightened agreeableness and risk perception. Extreme pro-group attitudes, including violence endorsement against outgroups, were linked to poorer working memory, slower perceptual strategies, and tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation-seeking-reflecting overlaps with the psychological profiles of conservatism and dogmatism. Cognitive and personality signatures were also generated for ideologies such as authoritarianism, system justification, social dominance orientation, patriotism and receptivity to evidence or alternative viewpoints; elucidating their underpinnings and highlighting avenues for future research. Together these findings suggest that ideological worldviews may be reflective of low-level perceptual and cognitive functions. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2020.0424

The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach.

Two distinct research traditions have established that (a) religiosity implies prosocial tendencies, though limited to proximal targets, and (b) religious fundamentalism (RF) relates to prejudice, often because of underlying right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) Through two studies, we investigated the idea that RF, due to underlying religiosity, also predicts prosociality that is limited to proximal rather than distal targets Specifically, we found that RF, unlike RWA and because of religiosity, predicted prosociality towards a nonfeminist but not a feminist target in need (Experiment 1) and willingness to help friends but not unknown people in need in the same hypothetical situations (Experiment 2) Moreover, like RWA, RF implied negative attitudes towards the feminist This limited, not extended, prosociality of people scoring high on RF was in contrast with their self-perceptions of being universally altruistic Fundamentalism seems to combine religiosity’s qualities (in-group prosociality) with authoritarianism’s defects (out-group derogation)

Religious Fundamentalism and Limited Prosociality as a Function of the Target

In research on religiosity and prejudice, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) has been studied alongside variables such as fundamentalism and orthodoxy. Four concerns regarding research on the relationship between RWA and religiosity are identified: (1) the overlap of religiosity and prejudice within the RWA scale; (2) the inflation of relationships by correlating part-whole measures; (3) covariation in the extremes of the construct hiding the possible independence of components within RWA; and (4) statistical artifacts arising in multiple regression from the combination of these factors. We elaborate these four issues and then demonstrate how they can lead to different interpretations of some previously published data. The article concludes with suggestions for the management and resolution of these issues that may allow RWA to continue to be used in religiosity and prejudice research and how it might evolve to become the boon to researchers that they seek.

/pdf/religion-prejudice-and-authoritarianism-is-rwa-a-boon-or-impsom8dms.pdf

Religion, Prejudice, and Authoritarianism: Is RWA a Boon or Bane to the Psychology of Religion?

The current study replicated an Owen & Sparrow (1976) genre seance study to examine the relationships between transliminality, psychokinesis (PK), subjective experiences, contagion effects, and variations in electro-magnetic field activity.  Eleven participants in two series of mock seance sessions were observed and recorded for anomalous, subjective and somatic experiences. No verifiable PK occurred, but relationships were found between geo-magnetic and electro-magnetic field activity as well as subjective anomalous experiences.  Electro-magnetic fields were found to significantly vary across sessions. Transliminality and related measures were not related to subjective reports of external anomalous phenomena.  Implications of electro-magnetic and geomagnetic fields associated with subjective anomalous somatic reports and future research are discussed.

A Test of Owen Genre Séances: Examining Anomalous Events, Psychosomatic Symptoms, and Electromagnetic Fields

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Religion, Prejudice, and Authoritarianism: Is RWA a Boon or Bane to the Psychology of Religion?

A Test of Owen Genre Séances: Examining Anomalous Events, Psychosomatic Symptoms, and Electromagnetic Fields