ArticleFrontiers in public health2024
The power of belief? Evidence of reduced fear extinction learning in Catholic God believers.
Article in Frontiers in public health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- The social life of Pavlovian learning.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Fight, Flight, or Vote Right? A Systematic Review of Threat Sensitivity in Political Conservatism.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Prejudice, Proxemic Space, and Social Odor: The Representation of the 'Outsider' Through an Evolutionary Metaverse Psychology Perspective.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: A Neuroscientific Protocol.Brain sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Religious beliefs can shape how people process fear. Yet the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain poorly understood. We investigated fear learning and extinction processes in a group of individuals who professed a belief in God, compared to non-believers. Using a virtual reality Pavlovian fear conditioning/extinction task, we measured neurovegetative activity associated with these forms of associative learning. Our finding shows reduced fear extinction among God believers, compared to non-believers. This suggests that the general mechanism of fear extinction learning is suppressed in these individuals. Importantly, this effect was not explained by state or trait anxiety scores. These findings align with previous evidence linking religiosity and spirituality with the neural circuit of fear and suggest that religiosity may be associated with weaker inhibitory learning processes related to fear.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.