The current study aims to examine the associations between private religious practices, daily spiritual experiences, and cardiovascular reactivity. A sample of 628 middle-aged participants was drawn from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) 2 Biomarker Project. Participants completed a standardized cardiovascular reactivity protocol consisting of baseline, stress, and recovery phases, with systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and heart rate (HR) monitored throughout. Psychometric scales captured levels of private religious practices and daily spiritual experiences. Regression models that adjusted for baseline cardiovascular activity, age, sex, body mass index, smoking status, race, and prescription medication use, showed that private religious practices were associated with lower SBP reactivity. This indicates that those who scored higher in private religious practices were found to have lower levels of SBP responses following an acute stressor. Further, these results remained when daily spiritual experiences were added to the model. There were no associations between daily spiritual experiences and any of the cardiovascular variables. Private religious practices, but not daily spiritual experiences, are related to lower SBP reactivity in this midlife sample. The current findings underscore the importance of considering private religious practices and spiritual experiences as distinct constructs when examining health outcomes.
Mystical dynamics-the notion that mystical oneness may unfold involving ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light-has been discussed anecdotally by psychedelic researchers and therapists but has not yet been empirically examined in controlled settings. This study investigated the occurrence and dose-dependency of mystical dynamics in healthy participants after administration of psychedelics. A total of 816 mystical-dynamics measurements were collected from 386 participants across 15 studies at two sites: University Hospital Basel (Switzerland) and Johns Hopkins University (USA). Participants received low to high doses of four serotonergic psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. Mystical dynamics was assessed using five corresponding constructs from the Psychedelic Experience Scale (PES100): ego disintegration, distress, renewal, luminous light, and mystical (focusing on mystical oneness, the core of mystical experience). We hypothesized strong intercorrelations of mystical oneness with ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light, and a dose-dependent intensity pattern. Results showed dose-sensitive strong correlations of mystical oneness with luminous light and renewal, and a moderate-to-strong correlation of mystical oneness with ego disintegration. These findings support a broader, dynamic model of mystical experience and offer novel insights relevant to psychedelic-assisted therapy, while acknowledging additional experiential features that may also associate with mystical oneness.
Researchers who seek to understand the mechanisms that give rise to presence experiences are faced with a phenomenon that spans a wide variety of contexts, takes many forms, and is studied in various disciplines. In the absence of a conceptual typology that distinguishes different types of experiences in which physically absent persons or entities seem to be present, researchers have difficulty specifying the extent to which the mechanisms they propose apply to different presence experiences, both within and outside their subfield. Moreover, in seeking to explain presence experiences, researchers across disciplines typically fail to distinguish between detecting a presence and identifying it. We propose a typology of detection processes with three dimensions: mode of detection (direct or indirect), nature of the initial stimulus (unknown or known), and source of the initial stimulus (external or not external). We suggest that people identify presences based on agent characteristics and/or agent context. Based on this typology, we suggest that claims of direct detection involve a variety of mechanisms, while indirect detection typically involves making attributions to relatively ordinary events. Attributional theories, updated based on the proposed typology, can provide a framework for explaining how presences are identified (regardless of how they are detected).
War and its associated suffering often lead people to turn to religion. Yet, it remains unclear whether this effect is limited to those directly impacted by war or whether the mere anticipation of conflict can also heighten religiosity. This study examines changes in religiosity among Czech and Polish residents surveyed before and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In Czechia, we found that religiously identified individuals reported higher levels of religiosity post-invasion, while no such change occurred among the non-religious. In contrast, in Poland, the invasion had no effect on religiously affiliated individuals but led to increased religiosity among those who identified as non-religious. We further analyzed data from Uruguay and Spain, countries geographically distant from the conflict, where we observed no and weak changes in religiosity, respectively. A supplementary analysis of Google Trends data reveals that online searches for "prayer" rose more sharply in countries closer to the conflict zone right after the invasion. These findings suggest that the psychological impact of anticipated violence-even from afar-can activate religious responses, likely as a coping mechanism. We further propose that the religious composition of a society shapes which groups are most susceptible to such effects.
Religion and spirituality (R/S) often have a protective effect on mental health, although there are instances where they can be detrimental. Much research has concentrated on measurable behaviors, while largely ignoring the deeper R/S constructs that drive these behaviors. Additionally, the diversity of R/S beliefs and practices held by patients and their health care providers has raised clinical concerns about discrimination, which can hinder the integration of research findings into clinical treatments. To address these issues, it is crucial to find improved ways to assess the core elements of R/S constructs that transcend specific traditions with implications for therapeutic interventions. This study aims to fill the existing gap by exploring how faith maturity affects mental health in a sample of psychiatric patients referred to a tertiary care center for outpatient treatment. Data collected from 150 participants was analyzed. Higher faith maturity predicted higher wellbeing, lower depression, and reduced suicidality. The nature of these relationships were expressed differently in men and women. These findings suggest that faith maturity needs to be considered in the clinical context of religious individuals, to guide the development of tailored interventions to promote mental health and wellbeing.
Supernatural agent beliefs are ubiquitous across cultures, yet many theories aimed at explaining this fact have not held up to scrutiny. The most famous of these, the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), has garnered several strong critiques and no supportive empirical evidence in almost 30 years. Yet, HADD is routinely cited as an explanation of why supernatural agent beliefs exist. We explore these problems and propose a new theoretical perspective to replace HADD. We suggest the tendency to create supernatural agents comes from the use of mental state reasoning to explain phenomenon beyond our current causal understanding. This is a non-automatic and cognitively effortful process. We review evidence that suggests we anthropomorphise when we are motivated to explain things we cannot explain using simpler causal mechanisms-like complex weather events or why good things happen to bad people. We argue this fits better than HADD with the evidence on how we use mental state reasoning to think about supernatural minds. This perspective allows us to account for two underspecified problems in the current literature: the shrinking domain of religion with the growth of science, and how to connect the origin of supernatural beliefs to the cultural evolution of religions.
The prevalence of costly rituals across different cultures could be viewed as confusing from an evolutionary perspective. Against this are suggestions they function as group-wide signals of commitment, increasing trust between group members. Given young children demonstrate an inherent sensitivity to ritual performance, using a three-way between-groups experimental design, the current study tested whether 3- to 6-year-olds perceive those who perform costly rituals as more trustworthy than those who do not. Children (N = 101) participated in two trials, each involving watching a video where a ritual-displaying and non-ritual-displaying informant attempt a task. Ritual cost, constant across both trials participants experienced, was manipulated by the deficit in reward stickers (zero, three, or five) the ritual informant had forgone by choosing to attempt the task in a less efficient, ritualized manner. Both informants then provided conflicting information about an item. After watching the video, children were asked to demonstrate selective trust by endorsing the ritual or non-ritual informant's testimony. Children trusted the ritual informant more as the cost associated with ritual performance increased. These findings align with the costly signaling hypothesis, suggesting a utility of costly rituals is to increase trust, and that sensitivity to this emerges early in development.
This article investigates how certain kinds of reading and meditation reduce attention to the here-and-now in order to leave room for imaginative experiences in carefully crafted religious and cultural designer environments. The article thereby engages with recent accounts on cultural acquisition and religious beliefs. From the perspective of active inference and 4E cognition, we argue that designer environments allow practitioners to go beyond modulating their predictions according to the minds of others, and instead enable them to go "elsewhere," that is, to imaginatively experience different sets of probabilities that can change how they predict the world in the here-and-now. Three different works are studied: Amadis of Gaul (1508), a best-selling series of chivalric novels by Garcia de Montalvo, The Spiritual Exercises (1548), a meditation manual by Ignatius of Loyola, as well as Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. These works have in common that they rebuild expectations in relation to the self by positioning it in new environments, and thereby extending the range of experience. Through such thinking "elsewhere" in designer environments, we argue, readers and meditators can modulate their attentional systems so as to perceive and act in the world in new ways.
The Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) have grown rapidly in developed, secularizing societies. We hypothesize that one reason for the proliferation of the SBNR is that spiritual beliefs, distinct from religiosity, afford some degree of meaning in life to people leaving religion. In two pre-registered studies (USn = 917; UKn = 1,289), we compared meaning in life among religious believers, SBNRs, and non-believers. Religious believers reported the most meaning, followed by SBNRs, and then non-believers, who reported the least meaning. Further analyses revealed that the differences between SBNRs and non-believers are largely mediated by differences in their degree of spiritual beliefs, whereas the differences between SBNRs and religious believers are largely mediated by differences in their degree of social connection. We conclude that spiritual beliefs and social connection play distinct roles in the creation of existential meaning in life, which may partly explain the popularity of SBNRs in secularizing societies.
