Marriage, religion and human flourishing: how sustainable is the classic Durkheim thesis in contemporary Europe?

This paper draws on the three waves of the European Values Survey across five countries (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to investigate the relationship between indicators of positive psychology (conceptualised as feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life), religiosity (conceptualised as self-assigned religious affiliation and self-reported religious attendance) and marital status. The results demonstrate that religiosity is, in general, positively correlated with both indicators of positive psychology. Further, across all waves and all countries, the pattern emerges that those respondents who are married are likely to report higher levels of happiness and greater satisfaction in life. These data provide contemporary support for the classic Durkheim thesis linking the two institutions of marriage and religion with human flourishing

Religion and happiness: Consensus, contradictions,comments and concerns

The relationship between religion and happiness has been the focus of much research. The present review provides a critical examination of this research and, in particular, focuses on conceptual and methodological concerns. The majority of studies report a positive association between measures of religion and happiness; however, contradictory findings are common. This is exemplified in the literature that has systematically employed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity alongside two different measures of happiness among a variety of samples. Two opposing conclusions have found consistent support. Research with the Oxford Happiness Inventory has consistently found religiosity to be associated with happiness, while research employing the Depression–Happiness Scale has consistently found no association. It is argued that such contradictions may reflect both conceptual and methodological weaknesses in this literature

Perceived Parenting Styles Fail to Mediate Between Anxiety and Attachment Styles in Adult Siblings of Individuals with Developmental Disabilities

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2859-5Adult siblings of individuals with developmental disabilities often experience higher levels of anxiety than individuals in the general population. The present study tested whether perceived parenting could mediate the relationship between attachment styles and anxiety in the sibling group compared to a control group. Little association was found between perceived parenting and attachment styles or anxiety for the siblings but there were robust and expected findings for the control. Adult attachment-related-anxiety was a significant unique predictor of anxiety in the sibling group but there was no mediational role for perceived parenting. Conversely, the majority of parenting styles significantly mediated the relationship between attachment and anxiety in the control. Implications for the atypical findings in the sibling group are discussed

Performance of the ATLAS Detector using First Collision Data

More than half a million minimum-bias events of LHC collision data were collected by the ATLAS experiment in December 2009 at centre-of-mass energies of 0.9 TeV and 2.36 TeV. This paper reports on studies of the initial performance of the ATLAS detector from these data. Comparisons between data and Monte Carlo predictions are shown for distributions of several track- and calorimeter-based quantities. The good performance of the ATLAS detector in these first data gives confidence for successful running at higher energies