In “Study Finds Religion Helps Us Gain Self-Control” (January 25, 2012), Medical News Today reports,
Thinking about religion gives people more self-control on later, unrelated tasks; according to results from a series of recent Queen’s University study.
“After unscrambling sentences containing religiously oriented words, participants in our studies exercised significantly more self-control,” says psychology graduate student and lead researcher on the study, Kevin Rounding.
That’s undoubtedly because the study subjects associated the words’ meaning with self-control.
It would be interesting to see what would happen to later tasks if the unscrambled words related to well-known themes around “dropping out,” “hanging loose,” and “not letting other people judge me.”
The researcher says,
“Until now, I believed religion was a matter of faith; people had little ‘practical’ use for religion,” Mr. Rounding explains. “This research actually suggests that religion can serve a very useful function in society. People can turn to religion not just for transcendence and fears regarding death and an after-life but also for practical purposes.”
Um yes. It’s remarkable that, in a world where religious belief tends to promote health and mental health, he hadn’t noticed that before.
Follow UD News at Twitter!