RESEARCH: "Religious Experience and Emotion: Evidence for Distinctive Cognitive Neural Patterns"

Categorical comparisons of neuroimaging data suggest that religious experience is cognitively mediated. Cognition involves coordinated integration of large-scale networks. The aim of this study was to distinguish neural networks mediating religious experience. A principal component analysis (PCA) wa...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Azari, Nina P. (Author) ; Missimer, John (Author) ; Seitz, Rüdiger J. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group 2005
In: The international journal for the psychology of religion
Year: 2005, Volume: 15, Issue: 4, Pages: 263-281
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:Categorical comparisons of neuroimaging data suggest that religious experience is cognitively mediated. Cognition involves coordinated integration of large-scale networks. The aim of this study was to distinguish neural networks mediating religious experience. A principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to cerebral blood flow data of a Christian religious experience and a happy emotion. Differences in variance patterns (PCs) were assessed. The religious experience and the emotion were distinguished by PC9, a neural network that evidenced two forms of expression: One involved prefrontal structures, which participate in social-relational cognition and which were shown previously to correlate with the religious state. Another involved cortical areas important for emotion-related language processing, reward, and action preparation. The results suggest that an essential dimension of religious experience involves social-relational cognition, mediated by a specific neocortical network.
ISSN:1532-7582
Contains:Enthalten in: The international journal for the psychology of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1207/s15327582ijpr1504_1