Original in English LiveScience: " Why Religion Makes People Happier (Hint: Not God) "by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 07 December 2010 5:37 a.m. ET
Translation and adaptation: Antonio Chávez
hnc.correo @ gmail.com
Religious people are more satisfied with their lives than non-believers, but a new study finds that there is a relationship with God that brings happiness to the devotees. Instead, stimulation of satisfaction can come from closer ties with neighboring terrestrial.
According to a study published on 07 December in the journal American Sociological Review , religious people increased life satisfaction through social networks built to attend religious services. The results are applicable to Catholics, evangelicals and Protestants. The number of Jews, Mormons, Muslims and people of other religions interviewed was too small to draw conclusions on these groups, according to study investigator Chaeyoon Lim, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
" show that [the life satisfaction] is almost entirely on the social aspects of religion, rather than the theological or spiritual religion," Lim told LiveScience. " We found that people are more satisfied with their lives when they go to church, because they build a network within your congregation ."
Happiness is a bench full of people
Many studies have found relationship between religion and satisfaction with life, but all research faced a "problem of chicken and egg," said Lim. Does religion make people happy or do happy people religious? And if religion is the cause of satisfaction with life, what is the responsible thing - spirituality, social relationships, or some other aspect of religion?
Lim and his colleague, the Harvard researcher Robert Putnam, addressed both issues in its study. In 2006, they contacted a nationally representative sample of 3.108 adult Americans by telephone and asked them questions about their religious activities, beliefs and social networks. In 2007, they called the same new group were 1.915 of them to meet the same batch of questions again.
Surveys showed that across all faiths, religious people were more satisfied than non-religious. According to the data, 28% of people attending a weekly religious service were "extremely satisfied" with their lives, compared with 19.6% of people who never attended services.
But satisfaction could not be attributed to factors such as personal prayer, the strength of belief or subjective feeling of God's love or presence. Instead, satisfaction was linked to the number of close friends who said had your faith. People over 10 friends in their congregation were nearly twice as satisfied with their lives than people without friends in their congregation. Are
special friends of the church?
Importantly, said Lim, the study suggests a causal relationship between religion and life satisfaction: the people who had begun attending church more often between 2006 and 2007 surveys became happier . Once again, happiness was explained entirely by an increase in close friendships in the church.
" We think it has something to do with the fact that you're with a group of close friends on a regular basis, together as a group and participating in certain activities that are meaningful to the group "said Lim. "At the same time, they share certain social identity, a sense of belonging to a community of moral faith. The sense of ownership seems to be the key to the relationship between church attendance and satisfaction with life . "
While more secular close friendships were also associated with satisfaction with life, friendships church seem to imply something that adds to the satisfaction, "said Lim. Additional research by Lim and Putnam, book published in the American Grace: How Religion Divides Us and States United States Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010) has found that, too, the religious propensity to charity and volunteering is associated with the close friendship in the church.
Theoretically, Lim said, membership in a secular group of friends who engage in meaningful activities and share a social identity can also increase life satisfaction. The researchers plan to conduct a third round of surveys with the same group of participants in 2011 in which they hope to collect data on age-old friendship groups.
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Comments
Well once again we have data on hand, such as the recent study Berghammer (2010) , which shows that the dilemma of the "chicken and egg" debate and within the adaptationism / exaptation about religion, this is not the causal factor of social satisfaction. And directly related employment terms 'satisfaction' / 'social' because at least it was known that on the one hand, socialization is linked to the production of oxytocin (and vasopressin) (Uvnäs-Moberg 1998 ; Kirsch et al . 2005 ; Hollander et al . 2006) and therefore feels good. Oxytocin is especially connected with the close ties and strong empathic that arise between individuals (eg in a sexual partner, mother / child, human / dog). Neurobiology that operates on the impact of intimate friendships on perceived satisfaction with life here a mechanism is obviously very likely, as indeed has been that oxytocin acts as a mediator of welfare ( Uvnäs-Moberg & Petersson 2005 ; Ishak et al . 2010). On the other hand, satisfaction with life, the welfare , has proved to be practically determined by the social context (cf .'s extensive international study Helliwell et al . 2009 ); what, resulting in the above, could be linked neuro-social mechanism that includes a sense of pleasure and reward expectation. Similarly, religiosity has been seen as a form of identity ( Ysseldyke et al . 2010). Pray
just is not fun, and the directional arrow of causality is cognition / social emotion → religion and not vice versa. However, although I personally hope the same results here with respect to the secular friends (I have argued that atheists are also largely due to socio-emotional factors ), religion and religiosity constituents have certainly unique (and therefore close friendships with that religion itself shares that would be special), what exactly have to do with the supernatural agency, the agency of death and spirituality. We have seen that as an anxiolytic religion offers more of what they do politics and sport: the agency of death (and the feeling of control). That is, although the success of religion, just something so fundamental as the satisfaction and well-being is not determined by it per se but by neurobiological and social mechanisms that facilitate their success, it is likely that there is a reverse causal arrow in cognition / emotion ← social religion, while their constituents are demonstrably aspects linked to the feeling of control and reducing anxiety and stress .
What should be clear is that there is, again, religion per se so that clearly has adaptive value, but those constituents associated with the control and modulation of anxiety that can be summarized as 'magical thinking', which is not equivalent because of religion and which is present both believers and atheists and skeptics (a " supersense " in terms of Hood), as opposed to theology or prayer, yes can be implanted or removed through cultural learning. For God is not the cause of life satisfaction, although it seems that we are predisposed to feel neurobiological far to share with close friends some system of beliefs and behaviors.
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