The study, conducted by Jun Kawahara of Hokkaido University and Takayuki Osugi of Yamagata University and published in the journal Japanese Psychological Research, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: is the link between bowing and attractiveness a universal social signal, or is it something learned within a particular cultural environment? The answer, according to the researchers’ series of experiments, points firmly toward culture as the decisive factor.

The scientific backdrop to the work lies in earlier findings from the same research team. In previous experiments, the researchers had discovered that Japanese participants rated portraits as more attractive when the images were tilted in a way that simulated a bowing motion. That result was intriguing, but it left an important ambiguity. A tilted head might have been attractive because bowing is a culturally meaningful gesture in Japan, or it might have been attractive for a more general reason. A downward head tilt is known in the psychological literature to increase perceptions of submissiveness, and the authors noted that such perceived submissiveness could, in principle, enhance perceived attractiveness across many different cultures, not just in Japan.

To distinguish between these two possibilities, the researchers moved beyond flat, tilted portraits and turned to three-dimensional computer models of human figures. Using these models allowed them to present participants with realistic depictions of people either standing upright or performing a bow, rather than merely rotating a two-dimensional image. When Japanese participants viewed the models, the results were clear: bowing produced a substantial increase in perceived attractiveness compared with standing upright. But when the researchers recruited participants from other countries, including the United States, Brazil, India, China, and Taiwan, the bowing effect largely disappeared. For these raters, whether a model bowed or stood straight made little to no difference to how attractive the model appeared.

Yet a methodological concern remained. All of the three-dimensional models used in these initial experiments were East Asian in appearance. The researchers themselves acknowledged the possibility that the observed effect may have been driven by the culturally familiar combination of a bowing gesture performed by an East Asian-looking figure. In other words, perhaps Japanese participants were not responding to bowing as a gesture in isolation, but to the pairing of a familiar gesture with a familiar racial appearance, while foreign participants found the same pairing unfamiliar or incongruent.

To resolve this confound, the team repeated the experiments with a new set of models representing four different racial appearances: East Asian, European, South Asian, and African. Two groups of participants rated these models, one recruited in Japan and the other in the United States. The outcome of this more rigorous design was decisive. The Japanese group found bowing models more attractive regardless of the racial appearance of the model, indicating that the gesture itself, and not the match between gesture and appearance, was responsible for the boost in attractiveness. The United States group, by contrast, continued to show little to no bowing effect across all four model types. The cultural origin of the observer, not the racial appearance of the person bowing, determined whether the gesture enhanced attractiveness.

The researchers also probed whether the physical attractiveness of the models themselves might interact with the bowing effect. In separate experiments using East Asian models, they varied how physically attractive the models were and examined whether this changed the response to bowing. Both Japanese and United States participants were sensitive to these differences in physical attractiveness, rating more attractive models higher regardless of posture. However, bowing increased attractiveness ratings substantially more among Japanese participants than among United States participants. This dissociation is important from a technical standpoint: it shows that the two groups processed the stimuli in broadly comparable ways when it came to static facial and bodily attractiveness, but diverged sharply when the dynamic social meaning of the bow was added to the display.

Taken together, the findings suggest that bowing motions are interpreted consistently within each cultural population, regardless of the racial and physical appearance of the person performing the gesture. For Japanese observers, bowing appears to function as a socially meaningful signal that feeds directly into judgments of attractiveness. For observers raised outside that cultural framework, the same motion carries no such evaluative weight, and attractiveness judgments remain anchored in other cues. The gesture, in effect, is only attractive to those who can read it.

The implications of the work extend beyond the laboratory. With growing numbers of foreign visitors and residents in Japan, the findings highlight how responses to the same social gesture can differ depending on the observer’s cultural background. A bow that conveys respect and, to Japanese eyes, enhances a person’s appeal may register as a neutral or merely conventional movement to someone from a culture without an equivalent practice. The research adds to a broader body of evidence in cultural psychology showing that even seemingly automatic perceptual judgments, such as how attractive a face appears, are shaped by learned social conventions rather than by universal rules alone.

For the field, the study offers a methodological lesson as well. Had the researchers stopped at their first round of experiments, they might have concluded that bowing enhances attractiveness in a culturally bounded way, but they could not have ruled out the alternative explanation involving racial appearance. By systematically varying the racial appearance of the models and the cultural origin of the raters, the team isolated the gesture itself as the operative variable. The result is a cleaner account of how cultural knowledge shapes social perception: the meaning of a movement, once internalized within a society, becomes woven into the perceptual machinery that its members use to evaluate one another, including the deeply consequential judgment of attractiveness.

Subject of Research: Cultural effects of the Japanese bowing gesture on perceived facial attractiveness

Article Title: The attraction of bowing

Article References: The attraction of bowing. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: bowing, attractiveness, cultural psychology, social perception, Japan, cross-cultural research, facial attractiveness, nonverbal communication, perception, Hokkaido University, Japanese Psychological Research, social gestures

The editorial builds on a rapidly maturing evidence base. Multidisciplinary international consensus conferences have defined spirituality as a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which people seek ultimate meaning, purpose, and transcendence, and experience relationship to self, family, others, community, society, nature, and the significant or sacred. Religion, in that framework, is the search for significance within established institutions oriented toward facilitating spirituality. Comprehensive systematic reviews have since demonstrated a strong positive association between health and religion or spirituality, prompting evidence-based recommendations from organizations as prominent as the World Health Organization for integrating spiritual considerations into healthcare delivery. Partnerships between US federal and state health agencies—including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Institutes of Health—and local faith-based organizations have shown positive outcomes at both individual and community levels, leading researchers to assess religion and spirituality as an important social determinant of health.

The epidemiological backdrop is striking. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that roughly 70 percent of Americans identify with a religion and also believe in an afterlife, and about half say that parts of nature—mountains, rivers, or trees—can carry spirits or spiritual energies. Yet physician training and professional culture remain steeped in a secular scientific worldview. Even so, physicians themselves report moments that feel more than ordinary, episodes that lend deeper significance to their work and strengthen their connection with patients. Clinical encounters, after all, are saturated with vulnerability, uncertainty, and intense emotions ranging from joy to grief. It is precisely within this charged space that the two new studies locate the phenomenon of sacred moments, defined as brief periods in which people experience transcendence, boundlessness, ultimacy, deep interconnectedness, and spiritual emotions.

The research team behind the conceptual model, led by Wong and colleagues, treats sacred moments as a marker of strong humanistic connection—one that may address the yearning for holistic and compassionate care felt by clinicians and patients alike, in which people are seen more fully as spiritual as well as biological, psychological, and social beings. Importantly, the authors use the word sacred in an expansive, non-ontological sense, emphasizing both religious and non-religious meanings. Spirituality, in their formulation, is the search for the sacred, encompassing deeper human experiences and emotions, and sacred moments are embedded within worldviews shaped by context and culture. This definitional flexibility is what allows the framework to travel across belief systems rather than presupposing any particular faith commitment.

That cross-cultural portability is put to the test in the second study, by Sakama and colleagues, which examines clinical practice in Japan. Like the United States, Japan hosts a multiplicity of religious traditions alongside widespread secularism. Almost all Japanese participants initially expressed unfamiliarity with the term sacred moments, whether rendered in Japanese or English. But once interviewers explained the concept, participants readily described parallel experiences, invoking ideas such as deep connection and fate. In the Japanese context, sacred moments appear to map onto a broader category of profound non-religious relational experiences, and some participants even voiced negative views toward religion and spirituality. The takeaway, the editorial authors suggest, is that sacred moments exist cross-culturally but are likely to be described and understood differently—a finding with real implications for how the concept is taught and studied internationally.

When recognized, noted, embraced, and reflected upon, these moments can carry immense weight in the daily lives of busy clinicians. Clinicians have described sacred moment experiences as the reason they went into medicine in the first place. The accumulating research indicates that such experiences nurture well-being and act as an antidote to burnout, with beneficial impacts on both clinicians and patients: decreased stress, improved mental health, an increased sense of purpose in life, and a stronger relational and therapeutic alliance between clinician and patient. What was long dismissed as ephemeral and nebulous is now being given empirical structure. Wong and colleagues present a rigorous framework that specifies predisposing factors, such as openness and religious or spiritual beliefs; precipitating factors, such as palliative care contexts or near-death experiences; and hindering factors, such as lack of time and training.

That conceptual scaffolding matters because it converts a subjective experience into a legitimate object of study, allowing processes and outcomes to be defined and tested through interventions. It also highlights how common these experiences may already be. Prevalence rates of sacred moments in healthcare are estimated at 68 percent among general internal medicine physicians, with the majority of sampled healthcare clinicians endorsing having had such an experience with a patient. In other words, the phenomenon the field has barely named is already woven through the routine fabric of hospital wards and outpatient clinics, occurring daily in environments that rarely pause to acknowledge it.

Yet acknowledgment is exactly what is missing. Although sacred moments may be common, intentional processing and discussion of them with professional colleagues is rare. Relevant content already exists in doctoring courses during the early professional formation of medical students, but these curricula are typically not revisited later in clinical training, when multiple daily patient encounters dominate a clinician’s day. The editorial calls for normalizing sacred moment experiences through story sharing and formal curricular education during residency and continuing medical education, giving clinicians the vocabulary to speak of these experiences in a nonjudgmental fashion with cultural humility. Modeling by senior physicians, the authors argue, will be a cornerstone of such curricula, and interprofessional interactions with spiritual care professionals—chaplains and ministers of various faith traditions—could both facilitate normalization and sharpen clinicians’ sensitivity to recognizing these experiences as they unfold.

The word sacred itself can provoke unease among clinicians, an uneasiness that reflects the secularization of the broader culture and the naturalism underlying the bioscience of physician training. But the editorial points out that physicians, regardless of worldview, have discrete patient and interprofessional experiences of deep connection, closeness, empathy, sacrifice, selflessness, and care—experiences that, while subjective and idiosyncratic, trigger combinations of awe and wonder, appreciation and gratitude, contentment and satisfaction. Reconceptualizing sacred moments in terms of these transcendent relational experiences makes the concept accessible to physicians of any religious framework or none. Psychology research reinforces the point: many nonreligious contexts reliably trigger awe and wonder, including engagement with nature, music, visual arts and design, collective movement such as dancing, marching, or singing in a crowd, and the observation of moral beauty, such as witnessing extreme courage, kindness, or selflessness in others.

The stakes extend beyond clinician well-being to the quality of patient care. Despite the importance of spirituality to large majorities of patients—estimates range from 71 to 99 percent—spiritual care remains infrequent: desired by 50 to 96 percent of patients but received by only 9 to 51 percent. Similar findings have been published over the last 30 years, suggesting a stubborn, structural gap. Patients often look to their doctors and nurses for support in negotiating the spiritual and existential dimensions of illness, yet clinicians report feeling uncomfortable or unprepared to provide it. Sacred moments, the editorial argues, sit within the broader spectrum of transcendent experiences, and the awe they evoke allows people to know, sense, see, and understand the fundamental truths that bond us together. Having physicians acknowledge their own sacred moments may therefore open the door to greater comfort in engaging the religiosity and spirituality of patients and families—nudging the clinical relationship toward something more fully realized, more inclusive, and, in the deepest sense, more human.

Subject of Research: The role of awe, wonder, and sacred moments in the clinician-patient encounter and their effects on well-being and care

Article Title: Attuning and Sharing Sacred Moments: Awe and Wonder in the Clinical Encounter

Article References: López, L., & Delisser, H. (2026). Attuning and Sharing Sacred Moments: Awe and Wonder in the Clinical Encounter. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10883-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10883-9

Keywords: sacred moments, spirituality, awe, clinician-patient relationship, burnout, internal medicine, spiritual care, cross-cultural research, medical education, social determinants of health, transcendence, well-being

The new study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, gathered responses from 5,589 participants across 21 countries, making it the first large-scale examination of both the replicability and the generalizability of mental accounting effects. The research was led by Giulia Priolo, Federica Stablum, and Enrico Rubaltelli of the University of Padova in Italy, with Kai Ruggeri, professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, serving as a senior expert on the project. Their central question was deceptively simple: do the classic patterns of mental accounting, documented originally in a handful of wealthy Western nations, still appear when tested at scale across vastly different economies, currencies, and cultural contexts?

The answer, according to the data, is a qualified but convincing yes. The study’s methodology drew on some of the most enduring experimental paradigms in consumer psychology. In one set of scenarios, participants faced consumer decisions involving identical products at identical prices but presented at different stores, probing whether the framing of a transaction altered its perceived value. In another classic measure, participants evaluated savings on purchases: does saving $5 on a $10 item feel the same as saving $5 on a $100 item? Rational models say the two savings are equivalent, but mental accounting theory predicts that people will perceive the smaller purchase as offering the better deal, because the discount is judged relative to the total price rather than in absolute terms. The survey was administered in local languages, and monetary values were carefully adjusted relative to each country’s gross national product, ensuring that the amounts carried comparable psychological weight across settings.

The researchers themselves admitted to genuine uncertainty about what they would find. When mental accounting was first proposed, cash and checks dominated everyday transactions, and the psychological distinction between, say, an overtime check and a tax refund was easy to observe. Today, both typically arrive as indistinguishable line items in a bank account. Considering the proliferation of automated digital payments and the sweeping changes in how people receive and spend money, Ruggeri argued that a large, robust study of the concept was not only appropriate but necessary. If the digital revolution had eroded the mental compartments into which people sort their finances, the theory’s practical relevance would have been in serious doubt. Instead, the effects persisted, suggesting that the cognitive habit of labeling money by its source and intended use is deeply embedded in human psychology rather than being an artifact of particular payment technologies.

One of the study’s most intriguing findings concerns economic context. Mental accounting effects were weaker in lower-income countries than in higher-income ones. The researchers offer two possible explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is historical: because the original studies of mental accounting were conducted in higher-income countries, the theory may have been calibrated to the cognitive patterns of populations with substantial discretionary income. The second explanation is more provocative and, in the researchers’ view, more critical: individuals with less discretionary income may be more sensitive to monetary values regardless of context. For a household living close to the margin of its budget, every dollar may genuinely be interchangeable with every other dollar, because each one must stretch to cover essential needs. In such circumstances, the luxury of treating a $100 refund as a discretionary bonus—money that can be spent frivolously—may simply not exist. People with lower incomes or fewer economic opportunities may treat financial amounts similarly whether they are part of major or small purchases, effectively collapsing the mental compartments that wealthier consumers maintain.

Equally notable was what the study did not find. Demographic factors such as age, education, and household income showed no association with the strength of mental accounting effects, indicating that the phenomenon operates consistently across diverse consumer groups. This consistency is scientifically valuable because it suggests mental accounting is not a quirk of any particular generation or educational background but a general feature of human financial cognition. At the same time, the effects were not entirely uniform: they varied systematically by social context, depending on whether decisions were made individually or interactively; by decision perspective, depending on whether participants were deciding for themselves or for others; and by role in price determination, depending on whether participants were setting prices or evaluating them. These moderating conditions give researchers a richer map of when the mental accounting lens distorts judgment most strongly and when its influence recedes.

The practical implications of the findings extend well beyond the laboratory, and Ruggeri offered a vivid example from health care spending involving Flexible Spending Accounts, or FSAs. These accounts allow consumers in some countries to set aside pre-tax money for medical expenses, but they typically come with a use-it-or-lose-it deadline at the end of the year. Early in the year, consumers avoid certain health-related choices, such as buying glasses or purchasing medicines, even when the money is sitting in the account. As the deadline approaches, the same funds are reclassified mentally as already spent, and purchases surge. The problem, Ruggeri noted, is that this timing is often medically and financially suboptimal. If someone needs glasses or medications in July, buying them in December is not an ideal outcome, and the delay can carry real health costs.

There is also a market dimension to the problem. Retailers are aware of this seasonal behavior pattern, and Ruggeri pointed out that some may charge a premium for FSA-eligible products as annual deadlines approach, meaning consumers could end up paying even more precisely because of their own mental accounting. The same $10 that reads early in the year as savings one should not touch transforms by December into money one has to use. This shift in labeling, rather than any change in the underlying financial reality, drives the purchasing decision. It is a textbook demonstration of how subjective accounts, not objective values, govern behavior, and it illustrates why the persistence of mental accounting matters for policy design, consumer protection, and public health alike.

For the field of behavioral economics, the study arrives at a moment when the discipline faces heightened scrutiny over the reliability and generalizability of its foundational findings. Large-scale, multi-country replications of classic effects have sometimes delivered sobering results, with several celebrated phenomena weakening or disappearing under broader testing. Against that backdrop, the confirmation of mental accounting across 21 countries stands out as an unusually robust result. The finding that the effect weakens in lower-income settings adds important nuance rather than contradiction, refining the boundary conditions of the theory while preserving its core claim: that people do not treat money as the fungible substance that economic models assume it to be.

The broader lesson for consumers is both humbling and empowering. Humbling, because even in a world of real-time balances and digital budgeting tools, our brains continue to sort money into invisible envelopes, and those envelopes shape choices in ways we rarely notice. Empowering, because recognizing the pattern is the first step toward correcting it. Whether the question is whether a refund feels like free money, whether a discount on an expensive item feels too small to matter, or whether year-end deadlines push us into purchases we should have made months earlier, the underlying mechanism is the same. Mental accounting, the new evidence confirms, is not a relic of the cash era but a durable feature of the human mind—one that will keep shaping financial decisions long after the last paper check has disappeared.

Subject of Research: Cross-cultural replication of mental accounting theory in consumer financial decision-making

Article Title: The mind of money: Mental accounting theory checks out

Article References: The mind of money: Mental accounting theory checks out. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: mental accounting, behavioral economics, consumer behavior, decision-making, cross-cultural research, replication, digital payments, health care spending, flexible spending accounts, Journal of Consumer Research, financial psychology, mind

The scale is built not on the diagnostic criteria of substance-use disorders but on a different theoretical foundation: Griffiths’ components model of addiction, itself derived from earlier work on gambling. This model holds that all addictions, whether to substances or behaviors, share six components. Salience describes the activity dominating thought and behavior; mood modification refers to the arousal or relief it produces; tolerance is the need for ever-larger amounts to achieve the same effect; withdrawal covers the unpleasant states that follow abstention; conflict captures the interpersonal and intrapsychic costs incurred; and relapse describes the return to old patterns after restraint. Crucially, the model is agnostic about whether the object of addiction is a substance, which is precisely what made it usable for sweets, a target whose pharmacological addictiveness remains hotly disputed.

Each of the six components was translated into a single item referring specifically to sweet foods. Do you think about sweets constantly? Do you eat them to change how you feel? Do you need more to get the same effect? Do you feel bad when they are unavailable? Does your sweet consumption create internal conflict over health, weight, or self-esteem? Do you return to old habits after cutting down? Respondents answer on a six-point agreement scale, and the items are summed into a score ranging from 6 to 36. The team deliberately avoided reverse-worded items, which are known to load on a separate wording factor that a six-item scale cannot absorb, particularly across translations. The English items were rendered into Spanish and Hungarian through independent forward translation and blind back-translation by bilingual translators, with discrepancies resolved in discussion and pilot-tested for comprehensibility.

To test the scale, the researchers recruited 1,130 adults online between August and November 2025: 437 English speakers, 300 Spanish speakers, and 393 Hungarian speakers. The recruitment used social media platforms and snowball sampling, with no paid advertising or participant pools, and the authors acknowledge that the self-selected, predominantly female samples limit generalizability. Participants completed the BSAS alongside the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0, the dominant 35-item instrument in the field, which adapts DSM-5 substance-use criteria to eating as a whole. The comparison was deliberate: the YFAS 2.0 leaves the object of addiction unspecified, a weakness critics have seized upon, since an addiction ordinarily has a target and food in general is not a candidate substance. Evidence suggests addictive-like eating concentrates in processed foods high in sugar and fat, making a sweet-specific measure a plausible refinement.

The psychometric results were largely encouraging. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a single underlying dimension in the total sample, with all six items loading significantly onto one latent factor. Fit was excellent in the English sample, acceptable in the Spanish sample, and weaker in the Hungarian sample, where the RMSEA index reached .120, exceeding conventional thresholds even though other fit indices remained acceptable. The authors report this plainly as a limitation rather than evidence of a different structure. Internal consistency was good to excellent everywhere, with Cronbach’s alpha ranging from .87 to .92, remarkable for an instrument one-fifth the length of the YFAS 2.0. Average variance extracted exceeded 50 percent in every group, and inter-item correlations were uniformly strong.

Perhaps the most technically demanding test was measurement invariance, the question of whether the scale measures the same thing in each language. Using nested multigroup models, the team examined configural, metric, scalar, and strict levels of invariance, each imposing progressively stronger equality constraints across groups. All levels were supported, and the invariance was full rather than partial: no item had to be released from any constraint. This matters practically because scalar invariance is what permits meaningful comparison of scores across language groups, and strict invariance implies that even measurement error is equivalent. Differences between the three language versions are therefore unlikely to be artifacts of translation or response style, though the authors caution that the self-selected samples differed substantially in age, sex distribution, and body mass index.

Convergent and discriminant validity told a nuanced story. The BSAS correlated strongly with YFAS 2.0 severity in the total sample, r = .61, and this association remained positive within each language group even after adjusting for age, sex, and BMI. Yet the scale was not merely a miniature YFAS. The heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations, a modern discriminant-validity criterion, came in at .745 in the pooled sample, below the .85 threshold that would suggest the two instruments measure the same construct. The authors are careful, however, noting that the language-specific correlation matrices showed numerical irregularities and that differences in theoretical framework and response format could contribute to the observed discrimination. Neither do these findings prove the BSAS adds predictive information beyond general food-addiction measures.

The associations with weight-related variables added further texture. In the pooled sample, BSAS scores correlated moderately with BMI and highest lifetime weight, weakly with current weight, and essentially not at all with lowest lifetime weight or self-nominated ideal weight. But the language-stratified analyses qualified this picture: highest lifetime weight was significantly associated with BSAS scores only in the English group, and current weight only in the English and Spanish groups. Regression models confirmed a positive BMI association after demographic adjustment, but the authors stress that cross-sectional data cannot establish causality. Correlations with self-reported eating-disorder history were numerically smaller for the BSAS than for the YFAS 2.0, hinting that the two instruments may have different external-validity profiles, though formal comparisons were not performed.

What the study deliberately does not claim is as important as what it does. Sweet addiction appears in neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11, and even food addiction lacks an accepted criterion standard. The authors consider a diagnostic cut-off premature: a threshold is a classification claim requiring sensitivity and specificity estimates against a clinical criterion, and deriving one from a self-selected, non-clinical sample would be an artifact. Low base rates in behavioral-addiction research also inflate false-positive rates, a pitfall commentators have warned against specifically. The BSAS is therefore offered as a dimensional research instrument, with high scores treated as an indication for further assessment rather than a diagnosis. The scientific dispute over whether sugar is addictive in the pharmacological sense remains unresolved, with reviews finding human evidence weak while others argue that highly processed foods meet established criteria for addictive substances. Because the components model describes a behavioral pattern rather than a mechanism, the scale can be useful regardless of how that debate ends. The authors call for independent replication, test-retest reliability studies, criterion validation against clinical interviews, and comparisons with related constructs such as sweet craving, emotional eating, and binge eating before the tool finds broader application.

Subject of Research: Development and psychometric validation of a brief multilingual scale for measuring addiction-like sweet consumption

Article Title: Development and Psychometric Validation of a Brief Sweet Addiction Scale (BSAS) in English, Spanish, and Hungarian

Article References: Avena, N., Kovács, R. E., de la Vega, R., Soraci, P., Somogyi, A., & Szabo, A. (2026). Development and Psychometric Validation of a Brief Sweet Addiction Scale (BSAS) in English, Spanish, and Hungarian. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-026-01731-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11469-026-01731-2

Keywords: sweet addiction, Brief Sweet Addiction Scale, psychometrics, food addiction, behavioral addiction, measurement invariance, components model, Yale Food Addiction Scale, sugar consumption, scale validation, cross-cultural research, eating behavior

The findings, published in Applied Research in Quality of Life, come from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study, one of the most ambitious efforts ever mounted to understand human well-being across cultures. In this preregistered analysis, a team led by Richard G. Cowden of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University examined associations between 13 individual characteristics and retrospectively assessed childhood factors and the adult experience of perceiving divine punishment. With a sample of 202,898 participants spanning nations on every inhabited continent, the study offers an unusually broad window into how early life may shape one of the most intimate dimensions of religious experience.

Religious and spiritual struggles, as psychologists define them, are tensions and conflicts over spiritual matters. They can take many forms: anger at God, doubts about ultimate meaning, moral struggles, conflicts with fellow believers, or the perception that a malevolent supernatural force is at work. The form examined in this study—divine punishment—is among the most clinically significant. Prior research has linked such struggles to elevated psychological distress, poorer physical health outcomes, and even increased mortality among medically ill patients, making it important to understand where these experiences come from and who is most vulnerable.

Methodologically, the study took an unusually rigorous approach for cross-cultural research. The investigators estimated country-level modified Poisson models, a statistical framework well suited to modeling binary outcomes such as whether or not a person reports perceiving divine punishment. In each country, the outcome was regressed on all candidate predictors simultaneously, allowing the researchers to estimate the unique contribution of each factor while holding the others constant. They then aggregated results for the 11 predictors common across countries using random-effects meta-analysis, a technique that treats each country’s estimate as an observation of a shared underlying effect while formally accounting for variation between nations.

The meta-analytic risk ratios revealed three broad families of predictors. The first was individual characteristics: male gender, for example, was associated with a higher likelihood of perceiving divine punishment in adulthood, a pattern that runs counter to the broader finding in the psychology of religion that women tend to be more religiously engaged than men on most measures. The second family comprised early-life conditions and experiences. Two stood out: childhood abuse and feeling like an outsider within one’s own family. Both were associated with an elevated likelihood of later perceiving divine punishment, echoing a growing literature connecting childhood adversity to religious and spiritual struggles in adulthood.

The third family involved social circumstances and influences. Greater childhood financial difficulty predicted a higher likelihood of adult divine punishment perceptions, suggesting that socioeconomic adversity during the formative years may leave a durable imprint on how people interpret their relationship with the sacred. More surprisingly, more frequent religious service attendance during childhood was also associated with a higher likelihood of adult divine punishment. This finding does not necessarily imply that religion itself breeds spiritual distress. Rather, the researchers note, children raised in highly religious environments may simply have richer conceptual frameworks for understanding suffering in theological terms—including the idea that misfortune reflects divine displeasure—making such appraisals more cognitively available in adulthood.

The theoretical significance of these results lies in what they say about the life course. Drawing on life-course epidemiology and Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, the authors frame perceiving divine punishment as an outcome patterned by the interplay of individual, relational, and socioeconomic forces that unfold over decades. Attachment theory offers one influential lens: early relationships with caregivers, particularly when marked by abuse or exclusion, may be internalized as templates for later relationships with God. A child who experiences parental figures as harsh, rejecting, or unpredictable may, as an adult, more readily construe the divine along similar lines. Studies of parental attachment and God image have lent support to this correspondence hypothesis, and the new findings extend it to a far larger and more culturally diverse sample.

Yet the picture is not uniform. The associations were somewhat heterogeneous across countries, meaning the strength—and in some cases the direction—of the links varied from one national context to another. This heterogeneity is itself informative. Religious doctrines differ in how prominently divine punishment features, and cultural norms shape whether such experiences are considered normal, shameful, or pathological. Economic conditions, family structures, and the role of religious institutions in public life all differ across the 22 countries studied. A childhood predictor that looms large in one setting may be buffered or amplified in another, a nuance that single-country studies of spiritual struggle have largely been unable to capture.

The practical stakes of this work are considerable. Religious and spiritual struggles are not merely private theological puzzles; growing evidence indicates they can affect whole-person functioning, including mental health, physical health, and social relationships. If childhood factors help pattern who experiences these struggles, then interventions—whether delivered by clergy, chaplains, mental health professionals, or community organizations—could be designed with vulnerable populations in mind. Adults with histories of childhood abuse, family exclusion, or economic deprivation may warrant particular attention in pastoral care and spiritually integrated psychotherapy, not because their perception of divine punishment is irrational, but because it is traceable to identifiable developmental origins that can be addressed.

The study also sets a methodological benchmark. By preregistering its research questions, variables, and analytic plan with the Center for Open Science before accessing data, and by making all analysis code openly available, the team reduced the risk of undisclosed analytic flexibility—a chronic concern in cross-cultural psychology. The data themselves are publicly accessible, inviting independent replication and extension. As the Global Flourishing Study moves into subsequent waves, researchers will be able to examine whether early-life predictors measured more precisely, and outcomes tracked longitudinally, confirm and refine the picture sketched here. For now, the message is striking: the way adults imagine God’s attitude toward them may carry the fingerprints of their earliest years, written differently in every culture but legible across them all.

Subject of Research: Childhood predictors of perceiving divine punishment as a form of religious and spiritual struggle in adulthood across 22 countries

Article Title: Early-Life Predictors of Perceiving Divine Punishment in Adulthood Across 22 Countries

Article References: Cowden, R. G., Henry, J., Harris, C., Johnson, K. A., Case, B., Padgett, R. N., Johnson, B. R., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2026). Early-Life Predictors of Perceiving Divine Punishment in Adulthood Across 22 Countries. Applied Research in Quality of Life. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-026-10644-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-026-10644-0

Keywords: divine punishment, religious struggles, childhood adversity, Global Flourishing Study, life course, psychology of religion, meta-analysis, attachment theory, cross-cultural research, spiritual struggles, childhood abuse, well-being