Ritualization reduces anxiety
Martin Lang and Radim Chvaja published a chapter discussing the relationship between ritual and anxiety in The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion.
Commentaries on the book Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind
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
