IBCSR’s Spirituality and Health Causation Project aims to move beyond the hundreds of correlational studies identifying the health effects of religious and spiritual practices to identify the causal, biochemical mechanisms that mediate spirituality-health connections. IBCSR’s partners in this project are Dr. Katherine Verdolini Abbott and Dr. Nicole Li at the University of Pittsburgh. The Spirituality and Health Causation Project is funded in part by an NIH subcontract through the University of Pittsburgh and by Boston University.
Key personnel: Wesley J. Wildman (PI), Katherine Verdolini Abbott, Nicole Li, Joel Daniels.
Religion as Social Cognition Are religious beliefs fundamentally different, or are they simply the result of cognitive systems built for interactions with other human beings projected onto a supposed supernatural agent? A recent report by Dimitrios Kapogiannis Aron K. Barbey…
In recent years, much ado has been made about mindfulness meditation. Researchers and psychologists have found strong, persistent connections between meditation and enhanced executive cognitive functions – that is, high-level brain processes, like attention switching, planning, and impulse control, that…