November 12, 2013, Volume 60, No. 13
Reproductive Issues Are Key in Predicting Religiosity
Some people are deeply religious and others, not at all. Evolutionary psychologists are interested in determining the functions of religiosity in social life that lead to this diversity. Two camps within the discipline have conflicting hypotheses: one believes religion’s essence is in promoting behaviors related to cooperation, while another believes that the attraction of religion has to do with sex and reproduction.
In a new study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, University of Pennsylvania psychologists have used a massive global survey to show that people’s attitudes towards sexual behaviors is far more predictive of their religiosity than their attitudes toward cooperation.
The study was conducted by senior researcher Jason Weeden and Dr. Robert Kurzban of the department of the psychology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.
At the core of their research is data from the World Values Survey, which has been administered to nearly 300,000 people from more than 90 countries for the last two decades. The survey contained questions on a wide variety of subjects, including respondents’ views on culture, religion, politics and morality.
One section asked respondents to say how much they felt certain behaviors could be justified. The researchers categorized some of these behaviors, such as “lying in your own interest,” “stealing property” and “cheating on taxes if you have a chance” as having to do with “cooperative” morals. They selected others, including “abortion,” “sex before marriage” and “homosexuality” as representing “reproductive” morals.
The researchers compared respondents’ answers in these two categories with answers to questions about their religiosity, such as belief in God and the frequency with which they attended religious services.
“When you make this comparison, it turns out that reproductive morals are the big, clear winner,” Dr. Weeden said. “Once you know the difference between how people think about things like abortion, premarital sex and divorce, you don’t learn anything else about how religious they are by asking what they think about lying and stealing.”
“It’s clear that people in religious groups cooperate,” Dr. Kurzban said, “but it’s never been clear that religious groups are more cooperative than other kinds of groups. In fact, you can learn a whole lot more about who is religious by asking them about their reproductive morals than about their cooperative morals.”
While this relationship was consistent the world over, the researchers found differences in the strength of the correlation between regions.
“In wealthy regions, such as parts of Asia, Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the relationship between religiosity and reproductive morals is really big,” Dr. Weeden said. “But for poorer regions, the correlations are smaller. Outside of countries that have suppressed religion, people in poorer countries tend to be highly religious and overwhelmingly conservative when it comes to reproductive morals but not necessarily cooperative morals.”
This new study builds upon research Drs. Weeden and Kurzban have been conducting during the last several years on the way people make decisions about religion.
“The usual story is that being raised in a religion causes you to have certain beliefs about abortion or premarital sex,” Dr. Kurzban said. “We think the causality works both ways. The major story most people miss is that the way people want to live can have a big impact on whether they want to be religious or not. People want to live their lives a certain way, and then look around to see if being religious helps them do that.”
“We think of being involved in a religious group as a social tool; it’s either useful or not useful to you,” Dr. Weeden said. “What churches do, in developed countries in particular, is provide an environment that helps out people who want committed relationships and more children. People in religions monitor each other, put social costs on casual sex and related areas that make those behaviors less likely to happen. They also provide services, like daycare and babysitting, social safety nets that are particularly useful to people who have lots of young children.”
“If you live a lifestyle where a stable marriage and lots of children is important to you, belonging to a church mitigates some of the risks that go along with that lifestyle, making religion an attractive tool. But if you’re, say, a college student who likes to party and isn’t planning to get married or have kids for a long time, all you’re getting from a religion is a bunch of hassles. So in the real world, what happens is that those people stop going to church, even if they were raised religious.”
Nursing Intervention Helps Mentally Ill With HIV
Having trained nurses follow up on medication use with mentally ill patients who are HIV positive was effective both at improving the patients’ quality of life and biological markers for the human immunodeficiency virus, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.
The study is thought to be the first to simultaneously measure psychosocial and biological outcomes in people with serious mental illness and HIV.
The study of 238 Philadelphia patients from September 2004 to April 2009, published in AIDS and Behavior, found significant improvements in the health-related quality of life for the patients, who were treated with a regimen that entailed weekly monitoring by community-based advanced practice nurses. The nurses worked for one year with the patients on taking their psychiatric and HIV medications.
The study pointed out that people with serious mental illness are at a heightened risk to contract and transmit HIV. Among people with serious mental illness, the estimated prevalence of HIV ranges from 4 to 23 percent, compared with 0.4 to 0.6 percent in the general population.
The study suggested that it was possible to alter the behavior of these seriously ill patients toward taking their medication, and found the benefits continuing a year after the trial ended.
“We taught people how to adhere to the treatment regimen, and the positive effects of intervention persisted,” said Dr. Michael B. Blank, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychology in psychiatry at the Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research in the Perelman School of Medicine.
“A fragmented health care delivery system does not provide optimal therapy for patients with combined HIV infection and serious mental illness,” said Dr. Michael Hennessy, a senior research analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center and a co-author of the study. “The study highlights an opportunity for change in the way dually diagnosed patients are treated.”
The study is available here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10461-013-0606-x
Do Cosmetic Procedures Help Patients Feel Better?
Despite the rapid rise in facial cosmetic procedures, there are few studies that investigate their psychological impact on patients, especially among those who undergo minimally invasive procedures using botulinum toxin and fillers to address wrinkles. According to a systematic literature review by researchers with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published in JAMA Dermatology, limited research does suggest that a number of psychosocial areas improve after patients undergo facial cosmetic procedures. However, those studies often lacked control groups or failed to follow patients over time, weakening the study’s validity.
Minimally invasive procedures account for an increasing majority of the more than 12 million facial cosmetic procedures being performed in the United States each year. Surgical procedures like nose jobs and eye lifts decreased nearly 40 percent over the past ten years, as botulinum toxin injections increased by 621 percent in the same time period.
“With the limited amount of well-performed studies, it is certainly premature to conclusively state that facial cosmetic procedures will not only make patients ‘look better’ but also ‘feel better’,” said senior study author Joseph F. Sobanko, assistant professor of dermatology. “We as dermatologic surgeons, plastic surgeons, dermatologists and others in the appearance-based specialties need more rigorously performed studies so we can properly advise patients and provide evidence to help determine who is likely to benefit the most from these aesthetic procedures.”
Out of thousands of studies the researchers analyzed, only 16 studies met the authors’ strict inclusion criteria and reported on the psychological impact of facial cosmetic procedures. Half of the included studies combined results from facial and body contouring surgeries like breast augmentation. For surgical facial cosmetic procedures such as face lifts or nose jobs, quality of life and self esteem improved. The single study that investigated a non-surgical procedure revealed an increase in self-esteem and quality of life after botulinum toxin injections. In the only study to look at a procedure-specific impact on body image, nose jobs significantly improved body image.
Dr. Sobanko noted that Penn is currently enrolling patients in a prospective large-scale study examining psychological changes in patients receiving soft tissue filler and botulinum toxin.