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Do you feel good when you go to church ?  I'm not talking about dropping the guilt for all the times you don't, but a true, down deep feeling of peace? That's your brain rewarding you, according to newswise.com. A new study has found that religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music, report researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine . “We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent,” says senior author and neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D. “In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia.” Specifically, the investigators set out to determine which brain networks are involved in representing spiritual feelings in one group, devout Mormons, by creating an environ...

Now this is a stumper. Did you know that the more religious an upbringing you have, the less altruistic you turn out to be? That's so says a new study ,  newswise.com reports. Many families believe religion plays an essential role in childhood moral development. But children of religious parents may not be as altruistic as those parents think, according to a new international study from the University of Chicago. A team of developmental psychologists led by Prof. Jean Decety examined the perceptions and behavior of children between ages 5 and 12, from Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. The study assessed the children’s tendency to share—a measure of their altruism—and their inclination to judge and punish others for bad behavior. Children from religious families were less likely to share with others than were children from non-religious families. A religious upbringing also was associated with more punitive tendencies in response t...

Chances are, if you've seen an angel, or been visited by someone who has died, or believe that God has talked to you, you're more likely to donate to your church or synagogue or mosque, according to newswise.com. That's because "supernatural experiences trigger religious donations," it reports. Not hard to figure out why. When good things we can't explain happen to us, we're usually pretty grateful.  And that gratitude sometimes impels us to give back. While voluntary giving to religious organizations consistently makes up the largest share of America’s philanthropy, little research has been done on why that is until now, newswise.com notes, crediting Katie Corcoran, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, with a new study that looks into it. "The study shows that the less religious doubt people have, the more they are willing to give," the Web site notes. In her study, respondents who gave to religiou...