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Religious Concepts (religious + concept)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	60%
Psychology	40%

Selected Abstracts

Nonconscious influences of religion on prosociality: a priming study

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 5 2007
Isabelle Pichon
Past literature on the automaticity of social behavior indicates that priming a concept automatically activates related behavioral schemas. In the two present studies we examined the impact of religion on prosociality. In the first study, we tested the impact of subliminal priming of religious concepts on prosocial behavior intentions. We found a main effect of this priming, moderated by valence: prosocial behavior tendencies were stronger when positive religious words had previously been subliminally primed. In the second study, we examined the accessibility of prosocial concepts, after the supraliminal activation of religion. Indeed, we found that not only were religion-related attributes more accessible when primed, but positive religious primes were also able to activate prosocial concepts. While previous research has shown the religion-prosociality link at the explicit level and in terms of the role of individual religiousness, these results indicate that religious concepts by themselves can nonconsciously activate prosocial behavioral schemas. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The Dead with Golden Faces.

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 2 2000
Connections, II Other Evidence
In this second part of this paper I extend the study of the regions where gold funeral masks were widespread in the late 6th,early 5th centuries BC. The broader cultural and historical contexts give the opportunity to understand more clearly the ethnic situation in these northern Balkan lands and the political development of the local tribal communities. The cultural interrelations between ethnically different people in this territory are studied as well, while the iconography of the local metalwork allows some religious concepts to be considered. [source]

Medicine and Religion in Ancient Egypt

RELIGION COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2007
Laura M. Zucconi
Seminal works on ancient Egyptian medicine tend to treat the field as distinct from religious practices, often fixating on the medical papyri as exemplifying either rational or magical treatments. Refocusing the study towards the ancient Egyptian conceptions of physiology and disease etiology shows that their medical practices integrated religious concepts such as maat (balance) and heka (power). Therapeutic measures and titles for healers, swnw, wab priest, and sau, further underscored the physical interchange between the mortal and divine worlds for the ancient Egyptians. [source]

Constructing ,God': a Contemporary Interpretation of Religion

THE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 1 2000
George Karuvelil
To discuss the rationality of religious beliefs of the meaning of those beliefs must be made intelligible, sometimes to those who do not share our presuppositions. Is it possible to explain the meaning of such basic concepts as ,Religion', and ,God' without presupposing other religious concepts? The present paper is an attempt at such a radical interpretation of religion. This is done by wedding a full-fledged constructivist epistemology with insights from the mystical traditions of the East and the West. How such an epistemology can account for both the unity and plurality of religions is also indicated. In the process I give not only a new interpretation of ,God' but also suggest the reasons for the failure of the "proofs" for the existence of God. Thus, a new way is opened up for discussing the rationality of religious beliefs. [source]

Contextualizing Counterintuitiveness: How Context Affects Comprehension and Memorability of Counterintuitive Concepts

COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 3 2007
M. Afzal Upala
Abstract A number of anthropologists have argued that religious concepts are minimally counterintuitive and that this gives them mnemic advantages. This paper addresses the question of why people have the memory architecture that results in such concepts being more memorable than other types of concepts by pointing out the benefits of a memory structure that leads to better recall for minimally counterintuitive concepts and by showing how such benefits emerge in the real-time processing of comprehending narratives such as folk tales. This model suggests that memorability is not an inherent property of a concept; rather it is a property of the concept, the context in which the concept is presented, and the background knowledge that the comprehendor possesses about the concept. The model predicts how memorability of a concept should change if the context containing the concept were changed. The paper also presents the results of experiments carried out to test these predictions. [source]