In most countries, religious people tend to be happier and less depressed, and it’s often suggested that religion somehow provides a happiness boost and protects against depression.

Maybe, so the thought process goes, religious belief alone is enough to perk people up, but even if it doesn’t then participating in religious gatherings, and the social support that goes with it – well surely that’s got to help.

It’s an attractive idea, but the problem is that it’s really difficult to unpick cause and effect. Maybe it’s simply that depressed people stop being religious. That’s certainly what a study that came out last year suggested.

About the only way to tease this out is to follow people over time, and see who gets depressed and who doesn’t. That’s what Michael King (University College London) and colleagues have done in a recent international study.

They interviewed 8318 patients without depression attending doctor’s surgeries in the Chile, Estonia, The Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Spain, and Slovenia. Then they interviewed them again 6 and 12 months later (well, most of them – some, especially the younger and less educated, didn’t turn up to later interviews).

They found that significantly more of the participants who actively practised religion (10.3%) or had a spiritual world view (10.5%) experienced an episode of major depression over those 12 months compared with those who had a secular outlook (7%).

Once they’d adjusted for differences in the characteristics of the people in the depressed and non-depressed groups (age, sex, education, employment, social support, past history of depression and country), only ‘spiritual world view’ (and not active religious participation) remained a significant predictor of future depression. And the country where this effect was strongest was the UK.

Among those who said they were spiritual or religious at baseline, there was a clear relationship between the strength of belief and the risk of depression. That’s shown in the figure – while the risk of depression for those who were only weakly religious was similar to the non-believers (at 7.4%), for the strong believers the risk rose to 12.5%.

They concluded that:

Although our main finding of an association between religious life understanding and onset of depression varied by country, we found no evidence that spirituality may protect people, and only weak evidence that a religious life view was possibly protective in two countries (Slovenia and The Netherlands). Finally, there was no moderating effect of religious and spiritual understanding of life on the impact of life events on onset of major depression.

So religion doesn’t seem to protect people from depression, and spirituality in the absence of religious affiliation seems to be a positive risk factor – especially in the UK.

That chimes with other studies (including a recent one by King himself [see references below], and one showing that New Agers are particularly prone to delusional beliefs). What does that mean?

Probably only that people who are prone to psychological problems tend to drop out of organised religion…

King, M., Marston, L., McManus, S., Brugha, T., Meltzer, H., & Bebbington, P. (2012). Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households The British Journal of Psychiatry, 202 (1), 68-73 DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.112.112003

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

In the West at least, women tend to be more religious than men. You can argue about why this might be (and I think it’s an entirely sociological phenomenon) but it nonetheless seems to be a fact of life.

So, it’s in this context that you need to think about recent research by Kristina Durante at the University of Texas, and colleagues, which suggests that ovulatory cycle can have a significant influence over how religious women are.

They recruited 275 American women aged 18-44 years for an internet survey. Basically, they asked them what stage of their menstrual cycle they were at, and used that information to split the participants into two groups: high fertility (cycle days 7–14) and low fertility (cycle days 17–25).

Then they asked them how religious they were, whether they were in a committed relationship, an other general questions.

The results were fascinating. Women did indeed report different levels of religious feeling according to their fertility, but the direction of the effect was completely different depending on whether or not they were in a committed relationship.

Single women were less religious when they were most fertile, while women in a relationship were more religious.

Durante also found similar relationships with social conservatism (decreases in fertile single women, increases in fertile committed women) and voting preferences (Barack Obama for fertile single women, John McCain for fertile committed women).

Why? Well it single women tended to be younger and less likely to have kids. Perhaps that could have affected the results, although it’s hard to see how.

Durante reckons it’s some kind of subconscious safety barrier to prevent women in relationships from sleeping around:

We believe that the key difference between these two groups is that married or engaged women are more invested in their relationship and therefore would have considerably more to lose if their relationship were endangered. Increased religiosity and conservatism at ovulation may serve to deter married women from cheating on their spouse.

I don’t think that can be right. After all, from an evolutionary perspective, women in a committed relationship have more to gain from an affair when fertile (if it works out, they get genes from a different, and perhaps fitter, male, but retain the support of hubby) than they have when less fertile (noting to gain, everything to lose).

That, ostensibly, is why fertile women prefer macho guys – have a fling with a macho guy for the genes, then go back to dependable hubby to raise the resulting kid!

The reverse is the case for single women. Single women are better off procreating with a conservative male who is going to hang around to help raise the kid.

I reckon it’s simply down to sexual desire, which is also linked to the ovulatory cycle.

If single women want to get laid, then they have to do it outside of a long-term relationship – which means breaking social taboos about how women are supposed to behave. So, well, those taboos just so happen to be disregarded. These women become more liberal.

For women in a relationship their best chance of sex is with their current partner. So social rules that keep partners together just so happen to become much more important…

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Earlier this year, there was huge kerfuffle over some Pastor in the US who refused to leave a tip in a restaurant. By way of explanation, he wrote on the bill that he already gave “10% to God”. Something that I never realised (coming from Europe as I d…

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The Christian God comes in different flavours. Most notably, while it’s sometimes portrayed as a benevolent, forgiving entity, at other times the imagery is of a vengeful, retributive god.

We already know that how Christians view their god is relate…

OK, here’s the deal. I’ll give you £5 right now – but if you can wait till next week, I’ll give you £6. Which offer would you take?

It’s the sort of dilemma that mirrors a host of real life problems, and how people react to questions like this reflects their approaches to these challenges. It’s called temporal discounting.

Researchers in Rome, Bologna and Leiden ran these kinds of tests on 40 Dutch Calvinists and 49 Italian Catholics. Ninety Atheists from both countries formed the control group.

What they found is shown in the graphic on the right.

Atheists, on the left, showed pretty much the same rate of temporal discounting whether they were Italian or Dutch.

The Dutch Calvinists, however, showed low temporal discounting, while the Italian Catholics showed high temporal discounting.

That means that the Calvinists were more likely than the Catholics to say that they were prepared to wait for a larger reward. The Catholics were more likely to take the money and run.

Now, they did find that Italians as a group tended towards high temporal discounting, but that this didn’t explain the difference between the two religious groups (because the atheists from the two countries were so similar).

The authors reckon this is probably something to do with the differences in religious teachings. They point out that both Catholic and Protestant teaching encourage asceticism, but Protestantism only teaches against immediate enjoyment and consumption – not against long-term accumulation.

More interesting to consider is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Calvinists believe that our fate is already decided, and therefore our actions are not so much the cause of our afterlife fate, but rather should be taken as evidence of God’s pre-planned fate for us.

Because there is no hope of ‘forgiveness’ in this way of thinking, Calvinists are going to be strongly motivated not to slip up even once. They write:

The protestant view of predestination gives a strong reason to behave virtuously not only in general but also in the specific context of intertemporal decision making: insofar as the short-term option is conceived as a form of impulsive self-indulgence, whereas the long-term alternative is seen as indicative of moral fibre and self control, Calvinists will have a much stronger incentive to opt for the latter than Catholics, thus showing lower time discount rates

Now, I don’t know enough about Calvinism to judge whether it is likely. And I wonder if it is, in practice, any different from the concepts of forgiving versus unforgiving gods (and an unforgiving God is, of course, also a feature of many Catholic and Protestant sects).

But certainly food for thought!

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.