Dissociation and religiosity: the role of religious experience

Dissociation can be conceptualized as a disruption in integrated processing of psychological information, due to alterations in consciousness. An emerging body of research has examined the relationship between dissociation and religiosity. Mixed findings suggest a weak positive association between these two constructs. The present aim was to investigate if dissociation predicted religious experience over and above a measure of religiosity. A sample of 371 Irish respondents completed the Measure of Prayer Type, the M Scale Short Version, and the Dissociative Experiences Scale. Binary logistic regression showed that religious experience was predicted by dissociation, controlling for frequency of prayer

Social Media, Collaboration, and Scientific Organizations

The use of social media by collaborative organizations has been studied in a variety of contexts, including virtual teams, enterprise organizations, and social movements. However, social media are not often examined within the context of scientific organizations. This article explores how an organization of 122 life scientists and science-related professionals—anonymized as Science City Network (SciCity)—combine monthly symposia with social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Using an online survey, we found that younger SciCity members are more interested in using social media to support a collaborative community, whereas older members are more interested in social applications. Social media use was not found to significantly differ by gender. Using social network analysis, we found that the SciCity Twitter network hubs of information who keep the network alive, but the hierarchical structure of the network reveals that it is better suited for information dissemination than innovation and collaboration. Our examination of this scientific organization ultimately offers insight into how a coalition of multiple social media technologies is used differentially by organizational members and that there is ultimately no general consensus of the utility of social media to scientific collaboration. This finding tempers some claims of the utility of social media for collaboration