Dataset Information

The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief.

ABSTRACT:

Background

While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and others have looked specifically at religious belief [2]. However, no research has compared these two states of mind directly.

Methodology/principal findings

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects-fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers-as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of "true" vs judgments of "false") was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.

Conclusions/significance

While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.

SUBMITTER: Harris S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2748718 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief.

Harris Sam S Kaplan Jonas T JT Curiel Ashley A Bookheimer Susan Y SY Iacoboni Marco M Cohen Mark S MS

PloS one 20091001 10

<h4>Background</h4>While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and others have looked specifically at religious belief [2]. However, no research has compared these ...[more]

PMID: 19794914

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Project description:Individuals prone to anxiety and depression often report beliefs and make judgements about themselves that are more negative than those reported by others. We use computational modeling of a richly naturalistic task to disentangle the role of negative priors versus negatively biased belief updating and to investigate their association with different dimensions of Internalizing psychopathology. Undergraduate participants first provided profiles for a hypothetical tech internship. They then viewed pairs of other profiles and selected the individual they would prefer to work alongside out of each pair. In a subsequent phase of the experiment, participants made judgments about their relative popularity as hypothetical internship partners both before any feedback and after each of 20 items of feedback revealing whether or not they had been selected as the preferred teammate from a given pairing. Scores on latent factors of general negative affect, anxiety-specific affect and depression-specific affect were estimated using participants’ self-report scores on standardized measures of anxiety and depression together with factor loadings from a bifactor analysis conducted previously. Higher scores on the depression-specific factor were linked to more negative prior beliefs but were not associated with differences in belief updating. In contrast, higher scores on the anxiety-specific factor were associated with a negative bias in belief updating but no difference in prior beliefs. These findings indicate that, to at least some extent, distinct processes may impact the formation of belief priors and in-the-moment belief updating and that these processes may be differentially disrupted in depression and anxiety. Future directions for enquiry include examination of the possibility that prior beliefs biases in depression might reflect generalization from prior experiences or global schema whereas belief updating biases in anxiety might be more situationally specific. Author summary Pessimistic beliefs are at the core of both depression and anxiety. How do these beliefs form and is this process similar or different for depression and anxiety? Here, we investigate these questions in a naturalistic experimental setting, in which undergraduate participants competed against one another to be selected by their peers in a hypothetical tech internship and were asked to judge their popularity relative to other participants. Importantly, participants were asked to make these judgements before any feedback and after receiving a series of pieces of feedback about whether or not they had been selected over other specific students. This design, along with computational modelling of the formation of participants’ beliefs, allowed us to establish that anxiety is associated with pessimistic beliefs that arise through negatively biased belief updating–i.e., the incorporation of negative information more readily into one’s beliefs than positive information–while depression is associated with pessimistic prior beliefs–that is, beliefs that are formed before receiving explicit feedback and likely on the basis of prior experiences or pre-existing schema.

Dataset Information

The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief.

Background

Methodology/principal findings

Conclusions/significance

Publications

The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief.

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