In their new book, McCauley and Graham focus on the age-old question about the relationship between psychopathologies and religion, exploring the similarities and differences between religious experiences and mental disorders such are schizophrenia, hallucinations, epilepsy, autism, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. JCSR invited scientists from involved fields to facilitate a critical discussion within the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion.
In his commentary, Jakub Cigán turns to the problems of a psychiatric approach, which understands religious experience as a mental or neurological disorder while often ignoring the cultural background of such experiences as well as the incompleteness of historical record necessary for diagnosis.
Valerie van Mulukom and Martin Lang discuss how cultural priors and capacity for imagination crucially modify religious experience.
You can find the commentaries and a reply here: https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/issue/view/1828
In a paper published in Religion, Brain & Behavior, J. Nenadalová & D. Řezníček demonstrated that some study participants in a sensory-deprived laboratory environment sensed the presence of another person. This feeling was mostly associated with perceived uncertainty and only somewhat associated with psychological dispositions.
In a cross-national investigation published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, F. M. Saxler with LEVYNA’s E. Kundtová Klocová and other colleagues show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected young people’s normative beliefs about unpaid domestic work; and that this effect is stronger in countries with greater gender inequality.
