Study finds religion = happiness + good mental health?

Posted by $ jbrenner 10 years, 6 months ago to Humor
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Atheists in here should have a field day with this one. Hence, I am posting this under humor. I saw a report on this on FoxNews this AM. Perhaps this will be the belly laugh that Khalling just posted about.
SOURCE URL: http://www.pressreader.com/usa/santa-fe-new-mexican/20150816/281625304038011/TextView


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  • Posted by Technocracy 10 years, 6 months ago
    You make friends and and being part of a group makes you feel better about yourself. That is where benefits lie there.
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    • Posted by khalling 10 years, 6 months ago
      are you saying atheists don't make friends well?
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      • Posted by Technocracy 10 years, 6 months ago
        No, I an not saying that at all.

        What I am stating is that religous groups use this process to recruit and keep members.

        Religion is not required. Making friends and developing a group identity, and feeling better about yourself through group reinforcement is tried and true psychology. As you correctly point out, we are doing the same thing in here, without the religous overtones. Although lately I am beginning to wonder about just where we are going here. This is also one reason facebook is so popular.

        Atheists make and keep friends as well as anyone else does. As this site illustrates.
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  • Posted by khalling 10 years, 6 months ago
    a random study is not well controlled.
    1.economic status?
    2. level of education?
    3.job/social status?
    4. religious people tend to conform better in society. Conforming helps to erase any dissonance for people who tend to think independently
    5. many religions have an attitude that at best you are to suffer quietly and at worst have a duty to portray happiness. therefore, is it possible that the questions were not answered honestly?
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 10 years, 6 months ago
      While your questions were important, your opening summary seems to be contradicted. This was, indeed, a random controlled study. Random does not mean "haphazard." If you are not satisfied with the abstract, you can buy the entire article, should you care to pursue the facts.

      I found your fifth assertion questionable. I might accept that different religions make those different claims: tradtional Catholicism is very much about coping with suffering; and Born Again Christians do seem bubbly to a distraction... but they may well have that "joy joy joy down in my heart." You do not know without a good study. Short of that kind of an investigation your rhetorical question must remain rhetorical.

      Your fourth point seems to harbor an internal contradiction. How can people who "tend to think independently" also conform to erase cognitive dissonance?
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 10 years, 6 months ago
    From the paper I cited above, "Stress and Psychological Effects," by Bernard H. Levin and Joseph A. Schafer

    The authors of this article submit that the commonly held views of heroism and stress response are both inter-related and misplaced.

    As pointed out by Summerfield (2001), post-traumatic stress disorder “is an entity constructed as much from sociopolitical ideas as from psychiatric ones” and “...the story of post-traumatic stress disorder is a telling example of the role of society and politics in the process of invention rather than discovery” (p. 95).

    Some people might expect that the elderly are vulnerable to psychological damage due to trauma. Wrong. Bonanno and his colleagues (2006) found that those 65 years of age and older were by far the most resilient age group within the population. The most vulnerable age group was those 25-34 years of age.

    Some other variables operate as most might expect. For example, the rich did much better than the poor, and the educated did much better than the uneducated. Asians did far better than whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups.

    McNally et al. (2003) show that strong social networks and high intelligence protect people against PTSD.
    http://www.policefuturists.org/pdf/20...
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 10 years, 6 months ago
    I do not see the humor. And this is not news. Similar polls in the United States found similar results: people with strong religious activity tend to be happier and more satisfied with life. However, the matter is somewhat complicated. Contrary to jbrenner's comment about "it does not matter" it does, indeed. Max Weber's classic investigation into suicide showed that though statistically wealthier, Protestants were also statistically less able to handle bad times than Catholics. Weber posited that the nature of religious participation was the causal factor: Catholics have a strong system of social support, whereas Protestants tend not to. In America today, of course, that may not be true. (See below.)

    CHAMPAIGN, lll. — There may be a few atheists in foxholes, but a new study suggests that in societies under stress, those who are religious outnumber – and are happier than – their nonreligious counterparts. Where peace and plenty are the norm, however, religious participation is lower and people are happier whether or not they are religious, the researchers found.-- http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0808...

    PRINCETON, NJ -- An analysis of more than 676,000 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index interviews conducted in 2011 and 2010 finds that Americans who are the most religious have the highest levels of wellbeing. The statistically significant relationship between religiousness and wellbeing holds up after controlling for numerous demographic variables. -- http://www.gallup.com/poll/152723/Rel...

    People who attend religious services weekly or more are happier (43% very happy) than those who attend monthly or less (31%); or seldom or never (26%). This correlation between happiness and frequency of church attendance has been a consistent finding in the General Social Surveys taken over the years. The same pattern applies within all major religious denominations. For example, 38% of all Catholics who attend church weekly or more report being very happy, while just 28% of Catholics who attend church less often say they are very happy. The survey also finds that white evangelical Protestants (43%) are more likely than white mainline Protestants (33%) to report being very happy, but this difference goes away after taking frequencey of church attendance into account. -- http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-numb...

    Also, rather than a second-hand newspaper story, this is from the paper cited in the Original Post here:
    "We examined whether changes in different forms of social participation were associated with changes in depressive symptoms in older Europeans. We used lagged individual fixed-effects models based on data from 9,068 persons aged ≥50 years in wave 1 (2004/2005), wave 2 (2006/2007), and wave 4 (2010/2011) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). After we controlled for a wide set of confounders, increased participation in religious organizations predicted a decline in depressive symptoms (EURO-D Scale; possible range, 0–12) 4 years later (β = −0.190 units, 95% confidence interval: −0.365, −0.016), while participation in political/community organizations was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms (β = 0.222 units, 95% confidence interval: 0.018, 0.428). There were no significant differences between European regions in these associations. Our findings suggest that social participation is associated with depressive symptoms, but the direction and strength of the association depend on the type of social activity. Participation in religious organizations may offer mental health benefits beyond those offered by other forms of social participation." --
    http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content... (If you want to read the paper and are not a subscriber, it costs $39 to download the PDF.)

    The reasons why this is true should be intuitively obvious. Religion gives you meaning, in both senses. It explains why you are important, and it explains how the world works.

    For a somewhat different perspective on a similar problem, these researchers were not impressed with claims of "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder." What they found, among other things, is that old Asian men handle crises quite well. On the other hand, Americans in their mid-30s who are living together but not married tend to fall apart when things outside their control go very wrong.

    Levin, B. H. and Schafer, J. A. (2007). "Stress and psychological effects". In Schafer, J. A. and Levin, B. H. (Eds.) Policing and Mass Casualty Events. Washington DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation, pp. 128-140.
    McNally et al. (2003) show that strong social networks and high intelligence protect people against PTSD.
    http://www.policefuturists.org/pdf/20...
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    • Posted by xthinker88 10 years, 6 months ago
      It's obvious. When the shit hits the fan those who are able to convince themselves in a fairy tale that tells them that the shit really isn't that important are going to appear to be happier. Because they have disconnected themselves from reality.
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    • Posted by $ 10 years, 6 months ago
      What you say is indeed true. I have seen such studies before, and in fact, sat on a dissertation committee for someone on a very closely related subject last semester. In this forum, however, where atheism is the default, the presumption is that mysticism should not be healthy for one's mental health.
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      • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 10 years, 6 months ago
        Measuring marginal mental health is difficult. An Objectivist would ask if you are proud of your achievements. I think that would be primary, or at least highly important. Instead, researches prefer to measure outward expressions such as whether the eyes crinkle when you smile (a sign of a genuine smile).

        Ayn Rand said that only an idiot smiles all the time, that the frown was the first touch of God on man's forehead.

        More deeply, consider her open letter to Boris Spassky. People compartmentalize their lives. We know that John D. Rockefeller considered himself a devout Baptist. We Objectivists just wish that he could have read Atlas Shrugged... but the man was no fool; and, indeed, in his own time, he had no lack of "freethinker" opinions in his world. See the Republican politician, Robert Ingersoll, for instance.
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