Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers.

Objectives: Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high-fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more children and receive more support with their children.

A practical guide to cross-cultural and multi-sited data collection in the biological and behavioural sciences.

Researchers in the biological and behavioural sciences are increasingly conducting collaborative, multi-sited projects to address how phenomena vary across ecologies. These types of projects, however, pose additional workflow challenges beyond those typically encountered in single-sited projects. Through specific attention to cross-cultural research projects, we highlight four key aspects of multi-sited projects that must be considered during the design phase to ensure success: (1) project and team management; (2) protocol and instrument development; (3) data management and documentation; and (4) equitable and collaborative practices.

Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter-gatherer societies.

Professional religious specialists centralised religious authority in early human societies and represented some of the earliest instances of formalised social leadership. These individuals played a central role in the emergence of organised religion and transitions to more stratified human societies. Evolutionary theories highlight a range of environmental, economic and social factors that are potentially causally related to the emergence of professional religious specialists in human history.

A comparison of self-report, systematic observation and third-party judgments of church attendance in a rural Fijian Village.

Social desirability reporting leads to over estimations of church attendance. To date, researchers have treated over-reporting of church attendance as a general phenomenon, and have been unable to determine the demographic correlates of inaccuracy in these self-reports. By comparing over eight months of observational data on church attendance (n = 48 services) to self-report in a rural Fijian village, we find that 1) self-report does not reliably predict observed attendance, 2) women with two or more children (≥ 2) are more likely to over-report their attendance than women with fewer children (≤ 1), and 3) self-report of religiosity more reliably predicts observed church attendance than does self-report of church attendance.

Social support, nutrition and health among women in rural Bangladesh: complex tradeoffs in allocare, kin proximity and support network size.

Malnutrition among women of reproductive age is a significant public health concern in low- and middle-income countries. Of particular concern are undernutrition from underweight and iron deficiency, along with overweight and obesity, all of which have negative health consequences for mothers and children. Accumulating evidence suggests that risk for poor nutritional outcomes may be mitigated by social support, yet how social support is measured varies tremendously and its effects likely vary by age, kinship and reproductive status.

Church attendance and alloparenting: an analysis of fertility, social support and child development among English mothers.

Many aspects of religious rituals suggest they provide adaptive benefits. Studies across societies consistently find that investments in ritual behaviour return high levels of cooperation. Another line of research finds that alloparental support to mothers increases maternal fertility and improves child outcomes.

Rural primary care providers' attitudes towards sexual and gender minorities in a midwestern state in the USA.

Introduction: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals experience poorer health outcomes compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. Rural residents might be particularly vulnerable due to their geographic isolation and residence in a setting that potentially holds more conservative norms. Data on the attitudes of rural providers in the USA towards this community are currently limited.

The Boundaries of Trust: Cross-Religious and Cross-Ethnic Field Experiments in Mauritius.

Several prominent evolutionary theories contend that religion was critical to the emergence of large-scale societies and encourages cooperation in contemporary complex groups. These theories argue that religious systems provide a reliable mechanism for finding trustworthy anonymous individuals under conditions of risk. In support, studies find that people displaying cues of religious identity are more likely to be trusted by anonymous coreligionists.

Rural Primary Care Providers' Experiences and Knowledge Regarding LGBTQ Health in a Midwestern State.

Purpose: Health disparities among LGBTQ people have been documented across various settings and recent research has indicated that many disparities are heightened in the context of rurality. Among these disparities is the decreased rate of primary care utilization by rural LGBTQ individuals. Understanding and addressing provider knowledge and attitudes related to LGBTQ health provides a relevant avenue for addressing underutilization.

Comparing Provider and Client Preferences for HIV Prevention Services in South Africa among Men Who Have Sex with Men.

Combination prevention efforts are now recommended toward reducing HIV incidence among men who have sex with men (MSM). Understanding the perceptions of both MSM and service providers is critical to informing the development of prevention packages and ultimately improving intervention effectiveness. This study assessed the preferences of MSM and health service providers in the administration of HIV-prevention efforts.

Sync to link: Endorphin-mediated synchrony effects on cooperation.

Behavioural synchronization has been shown to facilitate social bonding and cooperation but the mechanisms through which such effects are attained are poorly understood. In the current study, participants interacted with a pre-recorded confederate who exhibited different rates of synchrony, and we investigated three mechanisms for the effects of synchrony on likeability and trusting behaviour: self-other overlap, perceived cooperation, and opioid system activation measured via pain threshold. We show that engaging in highly synchronous behaviour activates all three mechanisms, and that these mechanisms mediate the effects of synchrony on liking and investment in a Trust Game.

News exposure predicts anti-Muslim prejudice.

News coverage of Islamic extremism is reigniting debates about the media's role in promoting prejudice toward Muslims. Psychological theories of media-induced prejudice date to the 1950's, and find support from controlled experiments. However, national-scale studies of media effects on Muslim prejudice are lacking.

Anxiety and ritualization: Can attention discriminate compulsion from routine?

Despite the wide occurrence of ritual behavior in humans and animals, much of its causal underpinnings, as well as evolutionary functions, remain unknown. A prominent line of research focuses on ritualization as a response to anxiogenic stimuli. By manipulating anxiety levels, and subsequently assessing their motor behavior dynamics, our recent study investigated this causal link in a controlled way.

Religion and the Unmaking of Prejudice toward Muslims: Evidence from a Large National Sample.

In the West, anti-Muslim sentiments are widespread. It has been theorized that inter-religious tensions fuel anti-Muslim prejudice, yet previous attempts to isolate sectarian motives have been inconclusive. Factors contributing to ambiguous results are: (1) failures to assess and adjust for multi-level denomination effects; (2) inattention to demographic covariates; (3) inadequate methods for comparing anti-Muslim prejudice relative to other minority group prejudices; and (4) ad hoc theories for the mechanisms that underpin prejudice and tolerance.

Outness, Stigma, and Primary Health Care Utilization among Rural LGBT Populations.

Background: Prior studies have noted significant health disadvantages experienced by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) populations in the US. While several studies have identified that fears or experiences of stigma and disclosure of sexual orientation and/or gender identity to health care providers are significant barriers to health care utilization for LGBT people, these studies have concentrated almost exclusively on urban samples. Little is known about the impact of stigma specifically for rural LGBT populations, who may have less access to quality, LGBT-sensitive care than LGBT people in urban centers.

Neural correlates of mystical experience.

Mystical experiences, or subjectively believed encounters with a supernatural world, are widely reported across cultures and throughout human history. Previous theories speculate that executive brain functions underpin mystical experiences. To evaluate causal hypotheses, structural studies of brain lesion are required.

Effects of Anxiety on Spontaneous Ritualized Behavior.

Environmental uncertainty and uncontrollability cause psycho-physiological distress to organisms, often impeding normal functioning. A common response involves ritualization, that is, the limitation of behavioral expressions to predictable stereotypic and repetitive motor patterns. In humans, such behaviors are also symptomatic of psychopathologies like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs).

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel.

A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from large-scale, industrialized, urban populations.

How does male ritual behavior vary across the lifespan? An examination of Fijian kava ceremonies.

Ritual behaviors of some form exist in every society known to anthropologists. Despite this universality, we have little understanding of how ritual behavior varies within populations or across the lifespan, nor the determinants of this variation. Here we test hypotheses derived from life history theory by using behavioral observations and oral interview data concerning participant variation in Fijian kava-drinking ceremonies.

What does God know? Supernatural agents' access to socially strategic and non-strategic information.

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents' socially strategic knowledge more quickly than non-strategic knowledge.

Perspectives on efforts to address HIV/AIDS of religious clergy serving African American and Hispanic communities in Utah.

Introduction: The HIV/AIDS epidemic in America is rapidly progressing in certain subpopulations, including African-American and Hispanic communities. Churches may provide a means for reaching high-risk minority populations with effective HIV/AIDS prevention. We report on a series of focus group interviews conducted with Utah clergy who primarily serve African American and Hispanic congregations.