Religion's encouragement and inhibition of psychological maturity

The secure feelings that religious faith instills can help strengthen people against the anxieties experienced in life. They can strengthen people against anxiety in a mature and immature way. When religion makes people feel secure by providing an image of God that magically removes anxiety, rather than that stimulates the strength to make people feel confident enough to manage anxiety, then religion is of the latter type. However, even religion of this type can lead gradually to growth, rather then permanently to immaturity. It can temporarily free people of their anxieties in order to make them feel secure enough to confront the fears and manage the conflicts which, when they were anxious, they were unable to do. A clinical case is provided to demonstrate this process.     

哈茨霍恩的后现代宗教观

关于C．哈茨霍恩(Charles HartShorne,1887--2000年,美国名宗教哲学家、过程神学主要代表人物之一。——译),人们知道得最多、讨论得最多的也许是他关于神的本质和存在的观念。的确,他的许多最重要的贡献都来自这一主题。     

Alcohol Reverses Religion's Prosocial Influence on Aggression

The relationship between religion and violence is controversial. Discrepant findings exist between survey studies and the limited number of experimental investigations of religiosity's influence on aggressive behavior. We have attempted to resolve this discrepancy by addressing previous limitations in the literature and assessing a heretofore‐untested moderator of religiosity and aggression: alcohol intoxication. This investigation included a community sample of 251 men and 269 women randomly assigned to either an acute alcohol intoxication condition or a placebo condition. Participants completed a series of questions drawn from standardized instruments of religiosity and spirituality prior to competing on an aggression laboratory paradigm in which electric shocks were received from, and administered to, a fictitious opponent under the guise of a competitive reaction‐time task. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed a significant beverage‐by‐religiosity interaction. Religiosity predicted lower levels of aggression for participants in the placebo group and higher levels of aggression for intoxicated participants. Results indicated that high religiosity coupled with alcohol intoxication may be a risk factor for aggression. This novel finding may help to clarify previous discrepancies in studies of religiosity and aggression.     

形形色色的“吃教”现象

早在建国前,中国民间就有“吃教”一说,例如称信仰基督教的人为“吃耶稣”的。近几年,笔者阅读了一些宗教书籍、宗教研究论文和宗教网站的报道,感到除宗教信仰者外,另一类“吃教”现象值得我们深思。一些专家、学者、教授,本身并不信仰宗教,但在宗教研究中却竭力夸大宗教的作用,夸大宗教的善良和智慧,掩盖宗教的残忍和愚昧,为的是迎合某种社会思潮,追求硕果累累、著作等身,等而下者,甚至是为了从富起来的一些宗教人士口袋里掏出更多的钱,这是学术上的“吃教”;一些出版商迎合社会潮流,大量出版宗教著作及其通俗读物,以致鱼龙混杂,禅书泛滥,…     

Mapping Religion's Other: A Review of the Study of Nonreligion and Secularity

In this article, we review the research literature on nonreligion, secularity, the nones, and other forms of “religion's other.” As a relatively new area of sustained and still growing research activity, with its attendant theoretical and methodological implications continuing to take shape, our focus is on the social science research from the mid‐2000s to the present. We consider the challenges of definition and perspective in this line of inquiry, highlight key arguments, and summarize the main findings from empirical studies of nonreligion and its relationship to topics including identity, health, family, and prejudice. After discussing the organizational and social movement aspects of nonreligious communities, as well as related developments in how scholars are studying these communities, we conclude our assessment of the state of this field by proffering questions relevant to both current efforts and whatever future directions are in store for research on religion's other.     

Religion's evolutionary landscape: counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or "agency detector," whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival--such as predators, protectors, and prey--but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.     

社会和谐从心开始——简论宗教在构建和谐社会中的积极作用

科学和社会快速发展造成的负面效应,我国“引导宗教与社会主义相适应”和“构建社会主义和谐社会”的政策导向,为宗教向社会和谐做贡献开辟了广阔的天地。其主要途径是慰藉和化导人心,也就是在建设社会主义精神文明的总体格局中,发挥宗教“超越现实”来建构“人生意义”的功能,让它通过科学实证之外的另一途径来化解人们的价值迷失：发挥宗教在非政治非经济意义上开展活动的功能,通过宗教活动让信众得到心灵的关怀和化解失意的情绪;发挥宗教建构彼岸意义和追求出世关怀的功能,以此化解人们毫无顾忌和毫无畏惧的心气,使人们自己为自己建立起违法乱纪的心理屏障。     

Evaluation of a victim as a function of fate similarity/dissimilarity

Upon observing a peer (victim) receive painful electric shocks as punishment for making errors in a serial learning task, subjects who anticipated a similar fate (n = 21) were significantly less likely to devalue the victim than those who did not anticipate a similar fate (n = 22). This finding supports the contention that an observer's devaluation of a suffering victim may vary as a function of anticipated fate similarity rather than perceived attitude or attribute similarity per se. Further, the data in conjunction with an additional, albeit marginally significant finding, suggest that derogation of the victim was more likely to be motivated by defensive attribution than a need to believe in a just world.     

Profiles of Anticipated Support: Religion's Place in the Composition of Americans’ Emotional Support Networks

In this article we analyze the role of religion in the composition of Americans’ networks of anticipated emotional support. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Religion and Family Life, which contains information on multiple sources of potential emotional support, we use latent class analysis to uncover four different anticipated support profiles, which are organized along two dimensions of variation: religiosity and breadth. We label these profiles religious, secular, broad, and limited. Our analyses demonstrate associations between these anticipated support profiles and a person's gender, family status, age, race, socioeconomic status, and religious involvement. For instance, we find that Catholics are more likely than non‐Catholics to have secular rather than religious support profiles, and African Americans tend to have profiles that are either religious or limited. Finally, we show that these profiles have implications for well‐being. We contribute to research on religion and emotional support by describing how religious and secular sources combine into overall anticipated support profiles. Our conclusion addresses the implications of these findings for current scholarship on religion and emotional support networks.     

Leadership and the fate of organizations

This article concerns the real-world importance of leadership for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leadership and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible. The authors next offer a taxonomy of the dependent variables used as criteria in leadership studies. A review of research using this taxonomy suggests that the vast empirical literature on leadership may tell us more about the success of individual managerial careers than the success of these people in leading groups, teams, and organizations. The authors then summarize the evidence showing that leaders do indeed affect the performance of organizations--for better or for worse--and conclude by describing the mechanisms through which they do so.     

The fate of completed intentions

The goal of this research was to determine whether and how people deactivate prospective memory (PM) intentions after they have been completed. One view proposes that PM intentions can be deactivated after completion, such that they no longer come to mind and interfere with current tasks. Another view is that now irrelevant completed PM intentions exhibit persisting activation, and continue to be retrieved. In Experiment 1, participants were given a PM intention embedded within the ongoing task during Phase 1, after which participants were told either that the PM task had been completed or suspended until later. During Phase 2, participants were instructed to perform only the ongoing task and were periodically prompted to report their thoughts. Critically, the PM targets from Phase 1 reappeared in Phase 2. All of our measures, including thoughts reported about the PM task, supported the existence of persisting activation. In Experiment 2, we varied conditions that were expected to mitigate persisting activation. Despite our best attempts to promote deactivation, we found evidence for the persistence of spontaneous retrieval in all groups after intentions were completed. The theoretical and practical implications of this potential dark side to spontaneous retrieval are discussed.     

The fate of old memories

A questionnaire relating to past events, and a well-known faces recognition test, were devised to provide an objective and quantitative assessment of recent and remote memories. Normal subjects aged from 40 to 89 were tested on recall and recognition versions of each test. It was found that performance declined with increasing age for all time periods sampled. No evidence was obtained to support the widely held belief that memory is inversely related to the remoteness of event in older subjects.     

On the fate of psychoanalysis and political theory

The author explores the present structure of the relationship between psychoanalysis and political theory, finding that the two often attempt to integrate each other's findings as mere resources within the pursuit of fundamentally self-determined projects. This radically misconstrues the force and meaning of the insights upon which they draw. Especially when psychoanalytic interpretations of collective subjects (nations, regions, etc.) occur, the relationship between psychoanalysis and political theory may not be appropriately mediated, promoting suspiciousness about the interpretive and therapeutic efficacy of such nonclinical "interventions." The author proposes an alternative paradigm for a new working relationship between psychoanalysis and political theory.     

On the fate of distractor representations

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which participants sometimes had to respond to the distractors instead of the target. Importantly, we varied the time interval between stimuli onset and the cue that signaled participants to respond to the distractors. We analyzed RTs and error rates from responses to distractors as a function of how long the target had been processed (and the distractor ignored) before the cue required a response to the distractor (i.e., stimulus-cue SOA). The data are compatible with selection models assuming that distractor stimuli are initially activated and then deactivated. Thus, we argue for selection models assuming top down deactivation of distractor representations that work in parallel with top down activation of target representations.