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.
Pleasure and Pain as Evolution’s Compass According to Darwinian theory, the point of life is simple: produce more life. But this vast agenda doesn’t always seem to motivate our countless humdrum, daily decisions. Instead, James A. Morris (Royal Lancaster Infirmary,…
Introduction It is examination time in many schools, colleges, and universities and students around the world are seriously stressed out. In the famous university town of Cambridge, England, for example one can almost feel the anxiety in the air as…
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…