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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| Contributors: | ; |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2005
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| In: |
The international journal for the psychology of religion
Year: 2005, Volume: 15, Issue: 4, Pages: 263-281 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| 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. |
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| ISSN: | 1532-7582 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The international journal for the psychology of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1207/s15327582ijpr1504_1 |