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Belief in hell, fear and executive function

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Belief in hell, fear and executive function is a survey of peer-reviewed research on how fear-based religious beliefs, especially fear of hell and of divine punishment, relate to anxiety, scrupulosity (religious obsessive-compulsive disorder), the brain's threat systems, executive function, analytic thinking and mental health. It also covers the research on the protective effects of religion. The question behind the page is whether fear of hell acts on the brain like a signal that one's life is in danger. In brief, the evidence does not answer that directly, because no study has measured it. The page sorts the findings into what is well supported, what is still debated and what has failed to replicate. A short, clearly labelled section at the end gives the Helian Way's doctrinal view.

Summary of the evidence

Claim Status Main sources
Belief in hell goes with lower well-being, and writing about hell briefly lowers mood Established correlational and short-term experimental evidence Shariff & Aknin 2014
Belief in a punitive God or an anxious attachment to God goes with more anxiety symptoms; a benevolent God or secure attachment goes with fewer Established cross-sectional surveys Silton et al. 2014; Ellison et al. 2014; Bradshaw et al. 2010
Fear of God and fear of sin are core parts of scrupulosity, and a more negative image of God goes with more severe symptoms Established Abramowitz et al. 2002; Siev et al. 2011
Religion causes OCD or scrupulosity Scholarly debate not supported as a general claim; religion mainly shapes the content of OCD Greenberg & Huppert 2010; Abramowitz & Jacoby 2014
Stress and anxiety impair working memory and cognitive flexibility Established meta-analyses Moran 2016; Shields et al. 2016; Arnsten 2009
Fear of hell triggers the brain's life-threat (amygdala, brainstem) circuitry and so lowers executive function Speculation plausible, but never directly tested Inference from Mobbs et al. 2007; LeDoux & Pine 2016; Flannelly et al. 2007
Religious belief correlates weakly and negatively with analytic thinking (cognitive reflection) Established in WEIRD samples; weak or absent in many other cultures Pennycook et al. 2016; Gervais et al. 2018
Prompting analytic thinking reduces religious belief (e.g. Rodin's The Thinker) Speculation key experiments failed to replicate Sanchez et al. 2017; Camerer et al. 2018
Religious attendance goes with lower depression, fewer "deaths of despair" and lower mortality Established large prospective cohorts; causation still not proven Li et al. 2016; Chen et al. 2020; Smith et al. 2003

Background: fear, anxiety and executive function

Established Executive functions are the top-down mental processes used to plan, focus and resist impulses. The three core functions are working memory, inhibition (inhibitory control) and cognitive flexibility (set-shifting). They depend heavily on the prefrontal cortex.[1][2]

Established Uncontrollable stress floods the prefrontal cortex with catecholamines (noradrenaline and dopamine). This weakens prefrontal regulation and shifts control of behaviour towards faster, more habitual responses driven by the amygdala and striatum.[3][4] A meta-analysis found that acute stress impairs working memory and cognitive flexibility. Its effects on inhibition were mixed: the authors describe a state with "more reactive processing of salient stimuli but greater control over actions".[5]

Established Anxiety, whether a trait or an induced state, is reliably linked to lower working-memory capacity. A meta-analysis of 177 samples (N = 22,061) found an effect of about g = −0.33.[6] Attentional control theory explains this: worry draws on the same attentional control that the goal-directed task needs.[7][8] Anxiety is strongly tied to uncertain future threat, more than to threat that is certain.[9]

Amygdala versus prefrontal cortex

Established Popular writing often calls the amygdala the brain's "fear centre". Leading researchers caution against this. LeDoux and Pine separate two systems. The first is the defensive survival circuits (with the amygdala at their centre) that drive bodily and behavioural responses to threat. The second is the cortical systems behind the conscious feeling of fear and anxiety. The two can come apart.[10]

Established How the brain responds depends on how close the threat is. In an fMRI "virtual predator" study, brain activity moved from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to the midbrain periaqueductal grey as the threat came closer. The midbrain activity tracked dread and lower confidence of escape.[11][12] On this model, distant threats are handled by cortical planning and worry systems, and only imminent threats recruit the reflexive survival circuits.

Is fear of hell a life-threat signal?

Speculation No published study has imaged the brain while people think about their own damnation, or measured fear of hell together with tasks of working memory, inhibition or flexibility. Any claim that fear of hell "hijacks the amygdala" or "shuts down the prefrontal cortex" is therefore an extrapolation, not a finding.

Scholarly debate The closest theory is Evolutionary Threat Assessment Systems (ETAS) theory. Flannelly and colleagues propose that beliefs about a dangerous or safe world, including beliefs about a punitive or benevolent God, adjust the brain's threat-assessment systems and so affect psychiatric symptoms.[13] The supporting evidence comes from surveys (see below), not from neuroimaging.

Speculation The threat-imminence research gives a reason to doubt a general life-threat model. Hell is distant, abstract and delayed. That pattern predicts chronic anticipatory worry handled by the cortex, the profile of generalised anxiety and obsessional doubt, more than an acute fight-or-flight response.[11][9] One can imagine exceptions, such as panic during vivid sermons or in people with OCD, but no one has measured them.

Scholarly debate The few experiments that directly compared loving and punishing ideas of God do not show the threat signal rising under punishment. In an EEG study of 123 Brigham Young University students, reflecting on God's love dampened the error-related negativity (ERN), a signal from the anterior cingulate linked to distress over errors, and it worsened task performance. Reflecting on God's punishment changed neither the ERN nor performance.[14] Separately, stronger religious conviction has been linked to a smaller ERN and fewer errors on a Stroop task. The authors read this as religion buffering anxiety.[15][16]

Scholarly debate Some brain stimulation work links threat to firmer belief. After a reminder of death, turning down activity in the posterior medial frontal cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation lowered stated belief in God and hostility to an out-group.[17] The result has not been replicated independently. Its premise, that death reminders reliably strengthen worldviews ("mortality salience"), failed a 17-lab replication.[18] The fMRI work of Kapogiannis and colleagues placed religious belief, including God's perceived emotion, in theory-of-mind and semantic networks, not in a dedicated fear system.[19]

Indirect route: anxiety as the mediator

Scholarly debate One model fits the evidence better. Where fear of hell produces chronic worry or anxiety, the well-replicated costs of anxiety to working memory and flexibility would be expected to follow.[6][5] This chain is reasonable, but each link comes from a different body of research. No single study has tested the whole sequence from hell belief to anxiety to executive function.

Hell beliefs, anxiety and well-being

Established In three studies, belief in hell went with lower happiness and life satisfaction, while belief in heaven went with higher. This held across 63 countries, in about 257,000 individual World Values Survey respondents, and in an experiment. In the experiment, 417 Americans wrote about hell, heaven or their day. Those who wrote about hell reported less happiness and more sadness and fear, and this was true of non-believers as well as believers.[20] The experiment measured a brief change in mood, not lasting anxiety.

Established In a US national sample (N = 1,426), belief in a punitive God was positively linked to four of five symptom classes (general anxiety, social anxiety, paranoia, obsession, compulsion), and belief in a benevolent God negatively to four. Belief in God as such was not linked to any.[21] Similarly, an anxious attachment to God predicts anxiety-disorder symptoms and distress, and a secure attachment predicts fewer.[22][23] These are cross-sectional studies: anxious people may also form harsher images of God.

Scholarly debate Fear of hell may not be a symptom of general anxiety. Using a new Hell Anxiety Scale, Cranney and colleagues found that hell anxiety was barely related to the fear and anxiety facets of neuroticism, or to dogmatism, fundamentalism or overall religiosity. It depended mainly on a person's own estimate of their chance of going to hell and on belief in free will. It was strongly linked to negative religious coping and death anxiety. The authors suggest it may be "a rational response to personal theological premises".[24]

Scholarly debate Fear of hell also has social and protective sides. Countries with more belief in hell than in heaven have lower crime rates, and people who see God as punishing cheat less in the laboratory.[25][26] A review of 15 cross-sectional studies found that moral objections to suicide restrain suicidal intent and attempts. It found only "sparse data" on fear of hell in particular.[27] Shariff and Aknin describe a trade-off: hell beliefs may help groups follow rules at an emotional cost to individuals.[20]

Established Studies of death anxiety and religiosity show a weak negative relationship overall, with high heterogeneity. Some studies find an inverted U, in which the very religious and the confidently non-religious are least anxious.[28][29]

Scrupulosity (religious OCD)

Established Scrupulosity is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder centred on religious or moral fears, such as having sinned, blasphemed or being damned. It is often treated with compulsive confession, reassurance-seeking, prayer or ritual.[30] The standard measure, the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity, has two factors: Fear of Sin and Fear of God.[31]

Established Among people with scrupulous OCD, a more negative image of God went with more severe symptoms, while a positive image was unrelated to severity. Most said their symptoms interfered with their religious life, and nearly one in five had no religious affiliation.[32]

Scholarly debate Clinicians generally hold that religion supplies the content of obsessions rather than causing OCD. The cognitive-behavioural model points to an overweighting of the importance of thoughts and an intolerance of uncertainty.[33][30] Exposure and response prevention, often worked out with the patient's religious authorities, is the standard treatment.[34]

Speculation A meta-analysis of 110 studies found broad, mostly small-to-moderate executive-function impairment in OCD generally.[35] No comparable body of work exists for the scrupulous subtype, so saying that fear of damnation impairs executive function through scrupulosity goes beyond the data.

Analytic versus intuitive thinking

Established Shenhav, Rand and Greene found that people who gave more intuitive (wrong) answers on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) reported stronger belief in God. This held when IQ and personality were controlled.[36] A meta-analysis of 31 studies (N = 15,078) put the CRT–belief correlation at r = −0.18, a modest effect.[37] Meta-analyses of intelligence and religiosity find correlations of about −0.20 to −0.23, partly mediated by analytic style.[38][39]

Established The gap is specific, not a general deficit. In over 63,000 internet participants, atheists did better than religious people at reasoning but not at working memory. The gap was largest on tasks that pit intuition against logic, such as a colour–word conflict task.[40] In a sample of 744, religious disbelief went with greater cognitive flexibility on three tasks, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.[41] Other work links religious belief to greater empathic and moral concern, so analytic style is not the whole picture.[42]

Failed replications

Speculation Gervais and Norenzayan reported in Science that subtle prompts to analytic thinking, such as viewing Rodin's The Thinker, reduced religious belief.[43] A preregistered multi-site replication (N = 941) found no effect (d = 0.07 in the wrong direction).[44] The Nature/Science Social Sciences Replication Project, with large samples, also failed to replicate it.[45] The original authors then wrote that they "no longer have confidence" in the Thinker result and that experiments of this type should be treated as provisional. They added that the small correlation itself has replicated.[46]

Scholarly debate The correlation itself depends on culture. Across 13 countries (N = 3,461), the link between analytic thinking and atheism showed up robustly only in pooled analyses and in three individual countries.[47]

Speculation Importantly, this whole literature concerns belief in God, not fear of hell. It does not show that fear makes people less analytical. It also does not show which way causation runs, since reflective people may simply be less likely to keep the beliefs they were raised with.[36]

Religious trauma and leaving religion

Established "Religious trauma" and "religious trauma syndrome" are not diagnoses in the DSM-5-TR or ICD-11. They are descriptive terms used by clinicians and researchers. A systematic review found 25 empirical studies of religious or spiritual abuse and trauma, which report links to depression, anxiety and trauma symptoms. The review notes that most studies are cross-sectional, use inconsistent measures, and draw on mainly Western, Christian samples.[48]

Scholarly debate A US survey of 1,581 adults estimated that 27–33% have experienced religious trauma and 10–15% currently have symptoms. These figures come from a new self-report instrument in a small journal and have not been independently replicated.[49]

Established Religious and spiritual struggles include feeling punished or abandoned by God, fear of demonic attack, and moral guilt. In a longitudinal meta-analysis, these struggles predicted worse adjustment over time.[50][51] In medically ill older patients, religious struggle predicted higher mortality over two years.[52] Negative religious coping, such as reading suffering as God's punishment, is consistently linked to more distress.[53]

Scholarly debate Leaving religion has costs of its own. In US General Social Survey data from 1973 to 2012, people who left the religion they were raised in reported poorer health and well-being than both those who stayed and those who were never affiliated. The gap was fully explained by lower attendance, which points to loss of community.[54]

Protective effects of religion

Established Across 147 studies (N = 98,975), religiousness had a small inverse link with depressive symptoms (r = −0.096), stronger under life stress. Negative religious coping, by contrast, went with more depression.[55] In ten Arabic, mostly Muslim samples, religiosity correlated with lower anxiety (mean r = −0.22).[56]

Established Large prospective cohort studies led by Tyler VanderWeele's group found the following:

  • Women in the Nurses' Health Study who attended services weekly had lower rates of depression.[57]
  • The same cohort had lower all-cause mortality.[58]
  • Across two health-professional cohorts, weekly attenders had a 68% (women) and 33% (men) lower hazard of death from suicide, overdose or alcohol.[59]
  • Adolescents who attended weekly had greater life satisfaction and positive affect in young adulthood.[60]

These are observational studies, mostly of US Christians, and the samples skew towards health professionals.

Scholarly debate The benefits seem to come mainly from community, meaning and self-regulation, not from fear-based doctrine. Life-satisfaction gains are largely explained by friendships within the congregation.[61] Meaning in life partly mediates the link between religiousness and well-being.[62] Religion is also associated with greater self-control, which is itself an executive skill.[63] A finding that religious primes "replenish" self-control[64] relies on the ego-depletion paradigm, which failed a 23-lab preregistered replication.[65] The confidence of a firm worldview may matter more than its content: confident believers and confident atheists both report more well-being than the uncertain.[29]

Assessment

Supported
  • Belief in hell, and especially a punitive or anxious relationship with God, goes with lower well-being and more anxiety and obsessional symptoms. Briefly thinking about hell lowers mood.[20][21]
  • Fear of God and fear of sin are central to scrupulosity, and harsher images of God go with more severe symptoms.
  • Anxiety and stress impair working memory and cognitive flexibility, through well-described prefrontal mechanisms.[6][3]
  • Religious participation, mainly through community and meaning, is linked to modestly better mental health and lower mortality.
  • Religious belief correlates weakly with intuitive cognitive style, mostly in WEIRD, fairly religious societies.
Speculative
  • That fear of hell is handled by the brain as an imminent life threat, through the amygdala and periaqueductal grey, or that it measurably lowers executive function. No direct test exists. Threat-imminence research suggests distant threats such as hell engage cortical worry systems instead.
  • That fear causes the analytic–intuitive gap, rather than reflective people dropping inherited beliefs.
  • Population estimates of "religious trauma", which is not a diagnosis.
Not supported or failed replication
  • That brief analytic-thinking prompts reduce religious belief.[44][45]
  • That death reminders reliably strengthen worldview defence.[18]
  • That religion as such causes OCD, or that believers have lower working memory.[40]
  • That religion is uniformly good or uniformly harmful for mental health: the kind of belief (benevolent or punitive) and the way it is held (secure or anxious) matter more than belief itself.[55]

Helian Way perspective

Helian Way doctrine. This page describes the stated beliefs and theories of the Helian Way, a new religious movement founded in 2026. Doctrine is attributed and reported in an encyclopedic voice; it is not presented as established fact.Factual claims touched on here are checked in the section Assessment.

Tradition / belief The Helian Way promises no heaven or hell. Its draft canon says the institution does not promise "survival of consciousness, heaven, hell, reincarnation", and that "death seals a record, not a metaphysical verdict".[66] See Consciousness and death in Helian doctrine.

Tradition / belief Helian doctrine treats fear as a hindrance to thought. The canon's optional practice of sound baths and "nervous-system calm" aims at "settling alarm so thinking can return". It states that "under threat, alarm systems get loud and executive attention gets thin", and adds that calm is "not a sacrament and not a cure" and "not therapy".[67] The Catechism's "executive mind" passage describes the prefrontal cortex as setting goals and inhibiting impulses and the amygdala as tagging emotional significance. It labels this "science, simplified".[68]

Tradition / belief The Charter bans fear as a tool. There are to be "no fear campaigns about leaving", no shunning and no thought-stopping. Members may leave "in one sentence" with no penalty, and "no one may be threatened with exclusion" from the Continuous Chain.[69] Fear of new knowledge is to be met by "patient, tiered teaching, never by contempt".[70] See Helian Charter and free exit.

Tradition / belief Under the Revisable Clause, the Helian claim that fear "thins" executive attention is a claim about the measurable world and must give way to evidence. On current evidence, the general claim that anxiety and stress impair executive function is well supported. The specific claim that fear of hell works as a life-threat signal remains untested.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A. & Wager, T. D. (2000). "The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex 'frontal lobe' tasks: a latent variable analysis". Cognitive Psychology 41(1): 49–100. doi:10.1006/cogp.1999.0734
  2. ↑ Diamond, A. (2013). "Executive functions". Annual Review of Psychology 64: 135–168. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). "Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function". Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10(6): 410–422. doi:10.1038/nrn2648
  4. ↑ Arnsten, A. F. T. (2015). "Stress weakens prefrontal networks: molecular insults to higher cognition". Nature Neuroscience 18(10): 1376–1385. doi:10.1038/nn.4087
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Shields, G. S., Sazma, M. A. & Yonelinas, A. P. (2016). "The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: a meta-analysis and comparison with cortisol". Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 68: 651–668. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.06.038
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Moran, T. P. (2016). "Anxiety and working memory capacity: a meta-analysis and narrative review". Psychological Bulletin 142(8): 831–864. doi:10.1037/bul0000051
  7. ↑ Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R. & Calvo, M. G. (2007). "Anxiety and cognitive performance: attentional control theory". Emotion 7(2): 336–353. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336
  8. ↑ Bishop, S. J. (2007). "Neurocognitive mechanisms of anxiety: an integrative account". Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(7): 307–316. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.05.008
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Grupe, D. W. & Nitschke, J. B. (2013). "Uncertainty and anticipation in anxiety: an integrated neurobiological and psychological perspective". Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14(7): 488–501. doi:10.1038/nrn3524
  10. ↑ LeDoux, J. E. & Pine, D. S. (2016). "Using neuroscience to help understand fear and anxiety: a two-system framework". American Journal of Psychiatry 173(11): 1083–1093. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16030353
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Mobbs, D., Petrovic, P., Marchant, J. L., Hassabis, D., Weiskopf, N., Seymour, B., Dolan, R. J. & Frith, C. D. (2007). "When fear is near: threat imminence elicits prefrontal–periaqueductal gray shifts in humans". Science 317(5841): 1079–1083. doi:10.1126/science.1144298
  12. ↑ Mobbs, D., Hagan, C. C., Dalgleish, T., Silston, B. & Prévost, C. (2015). "The ecology of human fear: survival optimization and the nervous system". Frontiers in Neuroscience 9: 55. doi:10.3389/fnins.2015.00055
  13. ↑ Flannelly, K. J., Koenig, H. G., Galek, K. & Ellison, C. G. (2007). "Beliefs, mental health, and evolutionary threat assessment systems in the brain". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 195(12): 996–1003. doi:10.1097/nmd.0b013e31815c19b1
  14. ↑ Good, M., Inzlicht, M. & Larson, M. J. (2015). "God will forgive: reflecting on God's love decreases neurophysiological responses to errors". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 10(3): 357–363. doi:10.1093/scan/nsu096
  15. ↑ Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I., Hirsh, J. B. & Nash, K. (2009). "Neural markers of religious conviction". Psychological Science 20(3): 385–392. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02305.x
  16. ↑ Inzlicht, M. & Tullett, A. M. (2010). "Reflecting on God: religious primes can reduce neurophysiological response to errors". Psychological Science 21(8): 1184–1190. doi:10.1177/0956797610375451
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  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Klein, R. A. et al. (2022). "Many Labs 4: failure to replicate mortality salience effect with and without original author involvement". Collabra: Psychology 8(1): 35271. doi:10.1525/collabra.35271
  19. ↑ Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A. K., Su, M., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J. (2009). "Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". PNAS 106(12): 4876–4881. doi:10.1073/pnas.0811717106
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Shariff, A. F. & Aknin, L. B. (2014). "The emotional toll of hell: cross-national and experimental evidence for the negative well-being effects of hell beliefs". PLOS ONE 9(1): e85251. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0085251
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Silton, N. R., Flannelly, K. J., Galek, K. & Ellison, C. G. (2014). "Beliefs about God and mental health among American adults". Journal of Religion and Health 53(5): 1285–1296. doi:10.1007/s10943-013-9712-3
  22. ↑ Ellison, C. G., Bradshaw, M., Flannelly, K. J. & Galek, K. C. (2014). "Prayer, attachment to God, and symptoms of anxiety-related disorders among U.S. adults". Sociology of Religion 75(2): 208–233. doi:10.1093/socrel/srt079
  23. ↑ Bradshaw, M., Ellison, C. G. & Marcum, J. P. (2010). "Attachment to God, images of God, and psychological distress in a nationwide sample of Presbyterians". International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 20(2): 130–147. doi:10.1080/10508611003608049
  24. ↑ Cranney, S., Leman, J., Fergus, T. A. & Rowatt, W. C. (2018). "Hell anxiety as non-pathological fear". Mental Health, Religion & Culture 21(9–10): 867–883. doi:10.1080/13674676.2018.1443436
  25. ↑ Shariff, A. F. & Rhemtulla, M. (2012). "Divergent effects of beliefs in heaven and hell on national crime rates". PLOS ONE 7(6): e39048. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039048
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  28. ↑ Jong, J., Ross, R., Philip, T., Chang, S.-H., Simons, N. & Halberstadt, J. (2018). "The religious correlates of death anxiety: a systematic review and meta-analysis". Religion, Brain & Behavior 8(1): 4–20. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2016.1238844
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Galen, L. W. & Kloet, J. D. (2011). "Mental well-being in the religious and the non-religious: evidence for a curvilinear relationship". Mental Health, Religion & Culture 14(7): 673–689. doi:10.1080/13674676.2010.510829
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Greenberg, D. & Huppert, J. D. (2010). "Scrupulosity: a unique subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder". Current Psychiatry Reports 12(4): 282–289. doi:10.1007/s11920-010-0127-5
  31. ↑ Abramowitz, J. S., Huppert, J. D., Cohen, A. B., Tolin, D. F. & Cahill, S. P. (2002). "Religious obsessions and compulsions in a non-clinical sample: the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity (PIOS)". Behaviour Research and Therapy 40(7): 825–838. doi:10.1016/S0005-7967(01)00070-5
  32. ↑ Siev, J., Baer, L. & Minichiello, W. E. (2011). "Obsessive-compulsive disorder with predominantly scrupulous symptoms: clinical and religious characteristics". Journal of Clinical Psychology 67(12): 1188–1196. doi:10.1002/jclp.20843
  33. ↑ Abramowitz, J. S. & Jacoby, R. J. (2014). "Scrupulosity: a cognitive–behavioral analysis and implications for treatment". Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders 3(2): 140–149. doi:10.1016/j.jocrd.2013.12.007
  34. ↑ Huppert, J. D., Siev, J. & Kushner, E. S. (2007). "When religion and obsessive–compulsive disorder collide: treating scrupulosity in ultra-orthodox Jews". Journal of Clinical Psychology 63(10): 925–941. doi:10.1002/jclp.20404
  35. ↑ Snyder, H. R., Kaiser, R. H., Warren, S. L. & Heller, W. (2015). "Obsessive-compulsive disorder is associated with broad impairments in executive function: a meta-analysis". Clinical Psychological Science 3(2): 301–330. doi:10.1177/2167702614534210
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G. & Greene, J. D. (2012). "Divine intuition: cognitive style influences belief in God". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141(3): 423–428. doi:10.1037/a0025391
  37. ↑ Pennycook, G., Ross, R. M., Koehler, D. J. & Fugelsang, J. A. (2016). "Atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers: four empirical studies and a meta-analysis". PLOS ONE 11(4): e0153039. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0153039
  38. ↑ Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J. & Hall, J. A. (2013). "The relation between intelligence and religiosity: a meta-analysis and some proposed explanations". Personality and Social Psychology Review 17(4): 325–354. doi:10.1177/1088868313497266
  39. ↑ Zuckerman, M., Li, C., Lin, S. & Hall, J. A. (2020). "The negative intelligence–religiosity relation: new and confirming evidence". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 46(6): 856–868. doi:10.1177/0146167219879122
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 Daws, R. E. & Hampshire, A. (2017). "The negative relationship between reasoning and religiosity is underpinned by a bias for intuitive responses specifically when intuition and logic are in conflict". Frontiers in Psychology 8: 2191. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02191
  41. ↑ Zmigrod, L., Rentfrow, P. J., Zmigrod, S. & Robbins, T. W. (2019). "Cognitive flexibility and religious disbelief". Psychological Research 83(8): 1749–1759. doi:10.1007/s00426-018-1034-3
  42. ↑ Jack, A. I., Friedman, J. P., Boyatzis, R. E. & Taylor, S. N. (2016). "Why do you believe in God? Relationships between religious belief, analytic thinking, mentalizing and moral concern". PLOS ONE 11(3): e0149989. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149989
  43. ↑ Gervais, W. M. & Norenzayan, A. (2012). "Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief". Science 336(6080): 493–496. doi:10.1126/science.1215647
  44. ↑ 44.0 44.1 Sanchez, C., Sundermeier, B., Gray, K. & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2017). "Direct replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012): no evidence that analytic thinking decreases religious belief". PLOS ONE 12(2): e0172636. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172636
  45. ↑ 45.0 45.1 Camerer, C. F. et al. (2018). "Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015". Nature Human Behaviour 2(9): 637–644. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z
  46. ↑ Gervais, W. M. & Norenzayan, A. (2018). "Analytic atheism revisited". Nature Human Behaviour 2(9): 609. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0426-0
  47. ↑ Gervais, W. M., van Elk, M., Xygalatas, D., McKay, R. T., Aveyard, M., Buchtel, E. E. et al. (2018). "Analytic atheism: a cross-culturally weak and fickle phenomenon?". Judgment and Decision Making 13(3): 268–274. doi:10.1017/S1930297500007701
  48. ↑ Ellis, H. M., Hook, J. N., Zuniga, S., Hodge, A. S., Ford, K. M., Davis, D. E. & Van Tongeren, D. R. (2022). "Religious/spiritual abuse and trauma: a systematic review of the empirical literature". Spirituality in Clinical Practice 9(4): 213–231. doi:10.1037/scp0000301
  49. ↑ Slade, D. M., Smell, A., Wilson, E. & Drumsta, R. (2023). "Percentage of U.S. adults suffering from religious trauma: a sociological study". Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry 5(1): 1–28. doi:10.33929/sherm.2023.vol5.no1.01
  50. ↑ Bockrath, M. F., Pargament, K. I., Wong, S., Harriott, V. A., Pomerleau, J. M., Homolka, S. J. et al. (2022). "Religious and spiritual struggles and their links to psychological adjustment: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies". Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 14(3): 283–299. doi:10.1037/rel0000400
  51. ↑ Exline, J. J., Pargament, K. I., Grubbs, J. B. & Yali, A. M. (2014). "The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale: development and initial validation". Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 6(3): 208–222. doi:10.1037/a0036465
  52. ↑ Pargament, K. I., Koenig, H. G., Tarakeshwar, N. & Hahn, J. (2001). "Religious struggle as a predictor of mortality among medically ill elderly patients". Archives of Internal Medicine 161(15): 1881–1885. doi:10.1001/archinte.161.15.1881
  53. ↑ Pargament, K. I., Smith, B. W., Koenig, H. G. & Perez, L. (1998). "Patterns of positive and negative religious coping with major life stressors". Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37(4): 710–724. doi:10.2307/1388152
  54. ↑ Fenelon, A. & Danielsen, S. (2016). "Leaving my religion: understanding the relationship between religious disaffiliation, health, and well-being". Social Science Research 57: 49–62. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2016.01.007
  55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 Smith, T. B., McCullough, M. E. & Poll, J. (2003). "Religiousness and depression: evidence for a main effect and the moderating influence of stressful life events". Psychological Bulletin 129(4): 614–636. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.129.4.614
  56. ↑ Abdel-Khalek, A. M., Nuño, L., Gómez-Benito, J. & Lester, D. (2019). "The relationship between religiosity and anxiety: a meta-analysis". Journal of Religion and Health 58(5): 1847–1856. doi:10.1007/s10943-019-00881-z
  57. ↑ Li, S., Okereke, O. I., Chang, S.-C., Kawachi, I. & VanderWeele, T. J. (2016). "Religious service attendance and lower depression among women—a prospective cohort study". Annals of Behavioral Medicine 50(6): 876–884. doi:10.1007/s12160-016-9813-9
  58. ↑ Li, S., Stampfer, M. J., Williams, D. R. & VanderWeele, T. J. (2016). "Association of religious service attendance with mortality among women". JAMA Internal Medicine 176(6): 777–785. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.1615
  59. ↑ Chen, Y., Koh, H. K., Kawachi, I., Botticelli, M. & VanderWeele, T. J. (2020). "Religious service attendance and deaths related to drugs, alcohol, and suicide among US health care professionals". JAMA Psychiatry 77(7): 737–744. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.0175
  60. ↑ Chen, Y. & VanderWeele, T. J. (2018). "Associations of religious upbringing with subsequent health and well-being from adolescence to young adulthood: an outcome-wide analysis". American Journal of Epidemiology 187(11): 2355–2364. doi:10.1093/aje/kwy142
  61. ↑ Lim, C. & Putnam, R. D. (2010). "Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction". American Sociological Review 75(6): 914–933. doi:10.1177/0003122410386686
  62. ↑ Steger, M. F. & Frazier, P. (2005). "Meaning in life: one link in the chain from religiousness to well-being". Journal of Counseling Psychology 52(4): 574–582. doi:10.1037/0022-0167.52.4.574
  63. ↑ McCullough, M. E. & Willoughby, B. L. B. (2009). "Religion, self-regulation, and self-control: associations, explanations, and implications". Psychological Bulletin 135(1): 69–93. doi:10.1037/a0014213
  64. ↑ Rounding, K., Lee, A., Jacobson, J. A. & Ji, L.-J. (2012). "Religion replenishes self-control". Psychological Science 23(6): 635–642. doi:10.1177/0956797611431987
  65. ↑ Hagger, M. S. et al. (2016). "A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect". Perspectives on Psychological Science 11(4): 546–573. doi:10.1177/1745691616652873
  66. ↑ Canon: Phaethon and Seroptia (draft canon, 30 September 2026; earlier drafts spell the name Phaetion), §5.
  67. ↑ Canon: Phaethon and Seroptia (draft canon, 30 September 2026), §4.2.
  68. ↑ Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 172.
  69. ↑ Canon: Phaethon and Seroptia (draft canon, 30 September 2026), §6; Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 104 and ¶ 188.
  70. ↑ Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 222 and ¶ 229.

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