Science and Religion Today » Findings

Breakdown of Hate Crimes Based on Religion

Heather Wax — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:08:56 +0000

Yesterday, the FBI released its “Hate Crime Statistics, 2009” report, which found that there were 8,336 victims of hate crimes in the United States last year, and that:

Of the 1,575 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

* 71.9 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
* 8.4 percent were victims because of an anti-Islamic bias.
* 3.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Catholic bias.
* 2.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Protestant bias.
* 0.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
* 8.3 percent were victims because of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
* 4.3 percent were victims because of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

Anger Can Increase Our Desire for Something

Heather Wax — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:38:44 +0000

Anger is a complicated emotion. Based on personal experience, we all know it produces negative effects, but psychologists have found that it has some positive features as well. For one thing, anger activates an area of the brain that is associated with many positive emotions. And now, psychologists have found that anger can make us want things more than if we weren’t angry.

Normally, we’re motivated to go after things that we find rewarding or make us feel happy—in other words, things that we associate with positive emotions. To test the link between anger and motivation, the researchers asked people to watch a computer screen that displayed common objects, like a mug or pen, and before each object, a neutral, angry, or fearful face secretly flashed on the screen—subliminally linking an emotion to the object. The participants were told to squeeze a handgrip when they wanted an object and that those who squeezed harder were more likely to win it. As it turns out, people put forth more physical effort to get the objects associated with anger, though they didn’t realize it.

This response—to try to get things associated with anger rather than avoid them— “makes sense if you think about the evolution of human motivation,” says Henk Aarts of Utrecht University, who led the study. For example, in an environment where there’s a limited amount of food, he says, “if the food does not make you angry or doesn’t produce aggression in your system, you may starve and lose the battle.”

Language Can Affect How We Think About Others

Heather Wax — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:03:04 +0000

Could the language that bilingual people use influence how they see other people? A team of researchers decided to test this idea by studying a group of Israeli Arabs who speak both Arabic and Hebrew fluently. They asked the volunteers to take a psychology test that would show how they responded to different words, designed to get at their attitudes and beliefs about Arabs and Israelis.
Specifically, they wanted to see whether the volunteers would find it easier to link Arab names or Jewish names with positive or negative traits—and whether the results depended on which language they were tested in. In one case, for example, the volunteers were asked to press one key on the keyboard whenever they saw a positive word or an Arab name and another key when they saw a negative word or a Jewish name. If the volunteers generally associated “good” with Arabs and “bad” with Jews, they would hit the keys faster than those who didn’t have these “implicit associations.”
So did it matter which language the volunteers were tested in? Turns out it did. Overall, the Arab Israelis showed more negative bias toward Jewish names than Arabic names—they were quicker to associate Jewish names with negative words and Arab names with positive words than they were at making the reverse associations—and this effect was much stronger when the words were presented in Arabic.
Shai Danziger, who worked on the study, isn’t surprised:

I am a bilingual and I believe that I actually respond differently in Hebrew than I do in English. I think in English I’m more polite than I am in Hebrew. People can exhibit different types of selves in different environments. This suggests that language can serve as a cue to bring forward different selves.

Does Anxiety Lead to Religious Extremism?

Heather Wax — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:03:20 +0000

A series of studies by researchers at York University shows that it can. The researchers put volunteers in either neutral or anxiety-provoking situations and then asked them to rate the strength of their religious convictions, including whether they would die for their faith or support a war to defend it. When people were put in anxiety-producing situations (like working on a complex math problem), they became more extreme in their religious convictions. The reaction was strongest in people with “bold” personalities (eager and tenacious, with high self-esteem) who were already vulnerable to anxiety and didn’t feel empowered to achieve their daily goals.
We shouldn’t be too surprised. Past research has shown that anxiety and insecurity can turn people to religion—and that religious conviction can act as a “buffer” against anxiety. And earlier studies by the researchers at York have shown that strong religious beliefs are linked to low activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain that becomes active when a person makes errors or experiences uncertainty. Psychologist Ian McGregor, who worked on those studies and the new one, notes in a write-up of the research that:

Taken together, the results of this research program suggest that bold but vulnerable people gravitate to idealistic and religious extremes for relief from anxiety.

Are You Looking at Me?

Heather Wax — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:20:27 +0000

Think you’re good at determining when someone of the opposite sex is looking at you? It turns out how easy it is may depend more on the other person than you—specifically, how masculine or feminine the other person’s face looks.
A team of researchers led by Ben Jones of the Face Research Lab at the University of Aberdeen asked volunteers to look at images of faces that had been altered to look more or less masculine or feminine and then indicate as quickly as possible whether the face was looking at or away from them. The researchers found the exaggerated features resulted in faster response times: Women could more quickly determine whether a man was looking at her when his face was “hunky,” while men could tell the direction of a woman’s gaze faster when her features were feminine and “pretty.” In other words, we’re quicker to notice when a “high quality potential mate” is paying attention to us.
As Jones explains in a write-up of the study:

There’s likely to be quite a big advantage to detecting when a particularly good potential mate’s looking at you. If I’m in a bar and there’s a pretty woman looking at me—if I wasn’t married—I would want to catch her eye before someone else did.

What We’re Learning About Loneliness

Heather Wax — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:14:35 +0000

Will hundreds of Facebook friends make you feel less lonely? Not likely, say researchers from The University of Arizona. It’s close family and friends that help us stave off feelings of detachment, their studies show.
The point is, relationships that don’t have a strong connection don’t help with loneliness—and lonely people tend to have fewer close connections. In fact, having close family and friends appears to be more important than romantic relationships when it comes to making us feel less lonely. But living away from close family and friends didn’t seem to make people more lonely, and relationships over the phone or email weren’t necessarily weaker than those in which the people got to see each other (though the strongest ones were those that were well-established in person).
There’s another interesting finding here: Personal perception matters most when it comes to feeling lonely. As Chris Segrin, head of the communication department at The University of Arizona, explains in a write-up of the studies:

Loneliness is the discrepancy between your achieved and desired level of social contact, and that has important implications. The portrait of a lonely person is very difficult to paint because what is really important is what is in your head.

What You Touch Can Influence What You Think

Heather Wax — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:39:43 +0000

In a series of studies, a team of researchers has shown that our sense of touch may strongly influence our thoughts and interactions with other people—even when what we’re touching and what we’re doing seem unrelated. What’s more, we appear to be unaware that the things we touch—their weight, hardness, and texture—influence the decisions we make.
To test how touch might influence our impressions, the researchers asked volunteers to judge a job candidate by looking at a resume that was on either a light clipboard or a heavy clipboard. Those using a heaving clipboard thought the candidate was more qualified and more serious about the job—had “heavier” interest in it, we might say—than did those who used the light clipboard. People were also more likely to view an interaction between two people as more difficult and harsh if they first handled rough puzzle pieces rather than smooth ones. And the researchers found that people sitting in hard chairs were less flexible and willing to negotiate than those sitting in soft chairs, making much lower second offers on a car after the first had been rejected.
Why would our tactile sensations have these kinds of effects? As infants, we learn about the physical world by touching things—it’s the first of our senses to develop—and as we get older, it becomes “a scaffold for the development of conceptual knowledge,” the researchers say. In other words, we use our sense of touch to form judgments about more abstract things; we touch smooth puzzle pieces and then think a situation is running “smoothly.”
When people do this, Joshua Ackerman, a professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains in a write-up of the research:

They are taking the easiest route to obtaining information, by drawing on the ideas they already have developed.

Does Divorce Spread Through Social Networks?

Heather Wax — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:36:46 +0000

We’re coming late to this, but it was too interesting to pass up. Vaughan Bell of the blog Mind Hacks drew our attention to a study by a team of researchers including Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (who co-wrote the book Connected) who found:

divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and co-workers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

That image at the top? It shows the clusters of divorce in a connected set of 631 friends and siblings. (Click on image for larger view.)

Does Religion Protect Teens From Alcohol Abuse?

Heather Wax — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:51:57 +0000

Tanya Button, a postdoctoral fellow in behavioral genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied identical and fraternal twins in adolescence and early adulthood and found that:

genetic factors could influence problem alcohol use more in nonreligious adolescents than adolescents with a greater religious outlook. This attenuation in religious participants indicates that religiosity exerted a strong enough influence over the behavior of religious individuals to override any genetic predisposition. The same was not true for young adults, however, for whom the genetic influence was consistent across levels of religiosity.

The researchers aren’t sure why the effect doesn’t hold for young adults, but suggest it may be because there is greater social control in our teenage years.

Emotional Rollercoaster of Romance Worse for Men

Heather Wax — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:34:42 +0000

Here’s an interesting finding: It turns out that the emotional ups and downs of a romantic relationship take a greater toll on men than women. Robin Simon, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University, looked at 1,000 unmarried males and females between the ages of 18 and 23 and found that males got greater emotional benefits than females when their relationships were going well, but their mental health suffered more during strained and unhappy times.
Simon suggests this may be because women are more likely to have other close relationships with family members or friends, while young men tend to be emotionally intimate primarily with their girlfriends.
On the other hand, girls are more affected by whether or not they’re in a romantic relationship at all, meaning they benefit more from simply being in a relationship, but they’re more likely to be depressed when a relationship ends.