Death salience moderates the effect of trauma on religiosity

Objective: Previous research has shown contradictory evidence for the relationship between religiosity and trauma; exposure to traumatic life events has been associated with both increases and decreases in religiosity over time. On the basis of a long theoretical tradition of linking death and religious belief and recent empirical evidence that thoughts of death may increase religiosity, we tested whether one determinant of trauma's influence on religion is the degree to which it makes death salient. Method: Using longitudinal data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a unique population-representative birth cohort, we tested whether the relationship between trauma and religiosity depends on whether the trauma involves death. Participants reported their private, ceremonial, and public religious behaviors at ages 26 and 32 and, at age 32, whether they had experienced any of 23 traumatic life events since age 26. Results: Experiencing the death of a loved one (but not an equally traumatic event not involving death) predicted a future increase in private religious behavior (e.g., prayer) among those already practicing such behaviors, and an increase in the importance of religious ceremonies among those with relatively little prior interest in them. On the other hand, experiencing a death-unrelated trauma predicted a future reduction in public displays of religiosity among those previously so inclined. Conclusion: The study represents a significant step in understanding religious responses to trauma, and emphasizes the importance of considering not only the nature of a trauma, but also the dimensions and practices of a victim's religiosity prior to it

Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS) - German Version

The 10-item scale measures the tendency to believe in supernatural entities such as immaterial agents, afterlife/otherworld places, and miraculous earthly events. The scale is intended to be a valid indicator of the cognitive component of religiosity, capturing ten cross-cultural beliefs that appear as religious themes in various religious contexts in the world. The scale was first tested in English by Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt (2013). The SBS aims to be applicable to people of different religious standing (atheists and believers alike), across various countries, with a multitude of religious backgrounds, if necessary by adapting the labels pertaining to the supernatural entities, while not altering the essence of the item content or response format. After its seminal application in New Zealand, and later in Croatia, among student samples with mostly a Christian cultural background, it was applied in Germany, yielding good reliability, a replicable factor structure, and cross-cultural measurement invariance (strict invariance across Germans and New Zealanders). The scale showed signs of construct validity and criterion validity in all samples (NZ, CRO, GER)

Death anxiety, exposure to death, mortuary preferences, and religiosity in five countries

We present three datasets from a project about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. These include data from 1,838 individuals in the United States (n = 813), Brazil (n = 800), Russia (n = 800), the Philippines (n = 200), South Korea (n = 200), and Japan (n = 219). Measures were largely consistent across samples: they include measures of death anxiety, experience of and exposure to death, religious belief, religious behaviour, religious experience, and demographic information. Responses have also been back-translated into English where necessary, though original untranslated data are also included

Testing the causal relationship between religious belief and death anxiety

Religion has long been speculated to function as a strategy to ameliorate our fear of death. Terror management theory provides two possible causal pathways through which religious beliefs can fulfil this function. According to the "worldview defence" account of terror management, worldviews reduce death anxiety by offering symbolic immortality: on this view, only people who accept the religious worldview in question should benefit from religious beliefs. Alternatively, religious worldviews also offer literal immortality, and may do so independently of individuals’ worldviews. Both strands of thought appear in the terror management theory literature. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this issue experimentally by manipulating religious belief and measuring explicit (Study 1) and implicit (Study 2) death anxiety. In Study 1, we found that the effect of religious belief on explicit death anxiety depends critically on participants' own religious worldviews, such that believers and non-believers reported greater death anxiety when their worldview is threatened. In Study 2, however, we find that religious belief alleviates implicit death anxiety amongst both believers and non-believers. These findings suggest that religious beliefs can alleviate death anxiety at two different levels, by offering symbolic and literal immortality, respectively

Incipient Social Groups: An Analysis via In-Vivo Behavioral Tracking

Social psychology is fundamentally the study of individuals in groups, yet there remain basic unanswered questions about group formation, structure, and change. We argue that the problem is methodological. Until recently, there was no way to track who was interacting with whom with anything approximating valid resolution and scale. In the current study we describe a new method that applies recent advances in image-based tracking to study incipient group formation and evolution with experimental precision and control. In this method, which we term "in vivo behavioral tracking," we track individuals' movements with a high definition video camera mounted atop a large field laboratory. We report results of an initial study that quantifies the composition, structure, and size of the incipient groups. We also apply in-vivo spatial tracking to study participants' tendency to cooperate as a function of their embeddedness in those crowds. We find that participants form groups of seven on average, are more likely to approach others of similar attractiveness and (to a lesser extent) gender, and that participants' gender and attractiveness are both associated with their proximity to the spatial center of groups (such that women and attractive individuals are more likely than men and unattractive individuals to end up in the center of their groups). Furthermore, participants' proximity to others early in the study predicted the effort they exerted in a subsequent cooperative task, suggesting that submergence in a crowd may predict social loafing. We conclude that in vivo behavioral tracking is a uniquely powerful new tool for answering longstanding, fundamental questions about group dynamics

Patterns and universals of mate poaching across 53 nations : the effects of sex, culture, and personality on romantically attracting another person’s partner

As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, 16,954 participants from 53 nations were administered an anonymous survey about experiences with romantic attraction. Mate poaching--romantically attracting someone who is already in a relationship--was most common in Southern Europe, South America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe and was relatively infrequent in Africa, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Evolutionary and social-role hypotheses received empirical support. Men were more likely than women to report having made and succumbed to short-term poaching across all regions, but differences between men and women were often smaller in more gender-egalitarian regions. People who try to steal another's mate possess similar personality traits across all regions, as do those who frequently receive and succumb to the poaching attempts by others. The authors conclude that human mate-poaching experiences are universally linked to sex, culture, and the robust influence of personal dispositions.peer-reviewe