The research team, led by Linlin Jin, Daobang Yang, Chaobang Ren and Yuping Zhao of the School of Management at Guangdong University of Technology, analyzed data from the 2018 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, a large-scale national survey managed by the Center for Social Survey at Sun Yat-sen University. Their analytical sample comprised 12,201 farmers, a scale that lends considerable statistical weight to the findings. Using Probit regression models, a standard econometric technique for modeling binary outcomes such as whether a person does or does not engage in entrepreneurial behavior, the team estimated the relationship between religiosity and the decision to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.

The headline result is straightforward: religiosity is positively associated with farmers’ entrepreneurial behavior. Farmers who reported stronger religious inclination were more likely to have taken the plunge into self-employment or business creation than those with weaker or no religious affiliation. Crucially, the association survived a battery of robustness checks and supplementary endogeneity analyses, the statistical procedures researchers use to guard against the possibility that the observed link is an artifact of reverse causation, omitted variables, or measurement error. In observational data of this kind, such checks are essential, because it is always possible that something else, such as personality, wealth, or local economic conditions, drives both religious belief and business activity simultaneously.

What makes the study more than a simple correlation is its exploration of the pathways through which faith appears to operate. The researchers propose and test two mechanisms. The first is psychological: religiosity is linked to stronger perceived control, the belief that one’s own actions can shape outcomes rather than leaving one’s fate to luck or external forces. Perceived control has long been recognized in the entrepreneurship literature as a key ingredient of entrepreneurial intention and behavior, echoing the logic of the theory of planned behavior, in which confidence in one’s ability to execute a course of action predicts whether one actually pursues it. Religious belief, the authors argue, can supply precisely this sense of agency, offering believers a framework in which effort, discipline and self-regulation are meaningful and rewarded.

The second mechanism is social. Religious involvement is associated with greater social network resources, the web of contacts, obligations and mutual support that individuals can draw upon when they need help. For a farmer contemplating a new venture, this matters enormously. Starting a business in a rural setting typically requires access to informal credit, trusted partners, information about markets, and labor that can be mobilized at short notice. Congregations and religious communities function as dense, trust-rich networks in which reputational stakes are high and cooperation is reinforced by shared norms. Decades of research on social capital and entrepreneurship have shown that such networks lower the practical barriers to business formation, and the new study suggests that religious participation is one route through which rural residents accumulate this intangible infrastructure.

The study also reveals that the faith-entrepreneurship link is not uniform across the population. The positive association was more evident among Buddhist respondents than among other groups, a finding that resonates with scholarship on Buddhist values emphasizing mindfulness, conscious work and ethical conduct, qualities that some researchers have linked to business practice. The association was also stronger among respondents without higher education and among those without a political belief. The authors interpret these patterns through the lens of substitution: for farmers who lack the sense of control that formal education tends to confer, or who lack the institutional backing that political affiliation can provide in the Chinese context, religion may serve as an alternative source of both psychological agency and social support. In other words, faith matters most where other resources for agency and connection are scarce.

This moderating pattern carries significant implications for how we understand entrepreneurship in developing economies. Much of the classic literature on entrepreneurial psychology was built on Western, educated samples, where the levers of self-belief and network formation are assumed to be secular and individualized. The Chinese rural case shows that in settings where formal institutions are thinner and educational attainment is lower, traditional and religious institutions can step into the gap, functioning as informal engines of both self-efficacy and social capital. The finding that religiosity substitutes for political belief is particularly striking in the Chinese context, where political membership has historically been a conduit to resources and opportunities; those outside that system may find in religious communities a parallel structure of belonging and support.

Methodologically, the study is careful in ways that strengthen confidence in its conclusions. The authors controlled for a range of demographic and socioeconomic variables, following best-practice recommendations on statistical control in correlational research, and they conducted mediation analyses to assess whether perceived control and social network resources indeed carry the effect of religiosity onto entrepreneurial behavior. The data themselves come from an anonymized, de-identified national survey conducted under ethical standards consistent with the Declaration of Helsinki, meaning the study involved secondary analysis rather than direct interaction with participants. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation, reflecting institutional investment in understanding the drivers of rural economic behavior.

Of course, the study has limits inherent to its design. It captures a snapshot from 2018, and the relationship between faith and enterprise is measured through survey self-reports, which are always vulnerable to imperfect recall and social desirability. Endogeneity can never be fully eliminated in observational data, however thorough the supplementary analyses. The authors are also careful with language: their findings describe associations and pathways, not proof that religious belief causes entrepreneurship in any individual case. A religious farmer who starts a business may be responding to market opportunities, family circumstances, or local policy shifts as much as to faith, and the study’s contribution is to show that, after accounting for these confounders, a robust religious effect remains detectable at the population level.

Even with those caveats, the research opens a compelling window onto the cultural psychology of rural enterprise. It suggests that the road from belief to business runs along two parallel tracks, one internal and one external: faith fortifies the mind’s sense of control while simultaneously thickening the social fabric from which ventures are built. As rural China continues its economic transformation, and as policymakers search for levers to stimulate grassroots entrepreneurship, the study implies that the informal institutions of belief deserve a place in the conversation alongside credit access, training and infrastructure. The power of faith, it turns out, may be partly the power of confidence and community, two of the oldest resources entrepreneurs have ever had.

Subject of Research: The relationship between religiosity and entrepreneurial behavior among farmers in rural China, mediated by perceived control and social network resources.

Article Title: The power of faith: why religiously inclined farmers are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial journeys?

Article References: Jin, L., Yang, D., Ren, C., & Zhao, Y. (2026). The power of faith: why religiously inclined farmers are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial journeys?. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1430. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09939-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09939-0

Keywords: religiosity, entrepreneurship, farmers, rural China, perceived control, social network resources, social capital, China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, Buddhism, Current Psychology, self-employment, psychology of religion

The research, published in the journal Heliyon, focused on a distinctive group within Iran’s primary health-care infrastructure: Women Health Volunteers, community members who collaborate with primary health-care centers on a voluntary, unpaid basis. These volunteers undergo basic health training and assist health professionals in delivering health promotion and prevention initiatives within their neighborhoods. Their responsibilities typically include educating families on healthy lifestyles, improving maternal and child health outcomes, encouraging chronic disease self-management, and bridging the gap between community members and primary care services. As these activities are unpaid and community-oriented, health volunteers represent an essential pillar of organized volunteerism within the Iranian primary health system.

To understand what motivates these volunteers, the research team drew on the Functional Approach to Volunteerism proposed by Clary and Snyder, a framework that holds individuals engage in volunteer activities because volunteering serves different psychological functions. These include the expression of values, social interaction, understanding, career development, enhancement, and protective motives. From this perspective, religiosity and spiritual health may be particularly relevant to the values function, as both constructs are associated with altruistic beliefs, meaning in life, and concern for the welfare of others. The framework is also consistent with Self-Determination Theory, which suggests individuals are more likely to engage in sustained prosocial behaviors when those behaviors satisfy intrinsic needs for meaning, relatedness, and personal fulfillment.

The study was designed as an analytical cross-sectional, non-experimental investigation conducted in 2025 in Saveh city. The final sample size was determined to be 345 participants initially enrolled, calculated using G*Power software based on a linear multiple regression model. Assuming a small-to-moderate effect size, a significance level of 0.05, a statistical power of 90 percent, and six predictors—religiosity, spiritual health, age, gender, education level, and marital status—the minimum required sample size was estimated at 181 participants. To account for potential incomplete questionnaires and improve statistical precision, a larger sample was recruited. Of the 345 health volunteers initially enrolled, 324 respondents with complete data were included in the final analysis.

Simple random sampling was employed after obtaining approval from the relevant ethics committee. A list of all registered health volunteers in Saveh was collected in collaboration with Saveh University of Medical Sciences, health centers, health bases, and pre-hospital emergency services. After assigning a unique numerical code to each individual on this list, a random number table was utilized to ensure random selection and minimize bias. Each number extracted from the table was matched with the assigned numerical code of the volunteers, and if a match occurred, that individual was selected as a final participant. Questionnaires were administered in two formats: online, completed by 165 respondents, and paper-based in person, initially distributed to 180 respondents, of which 21 incomplete questionnaires were excluded, yielding a final paper-based total of 159. Respondents were not randomly assigned to the two modes of data collection; rather, the mode of completion was determined by participants’ accessibility and personal preference. The researchers compared the main study variables across the two formats using the Mann–Whitney U test and found no statistically significant differences.

Three validated instruments were used to collect data. The Volunteer Functions Inventory, developed by Clary and colleagues, assesses the motivations underlying volunteering across six subscales: Protective, Values, Career, Social, Understanding, and Enhancement. The validated Persian version used in this study contained 29 items, with the total possible score ranging from 29 to 203. The Religiosity Questionnaire, based on the work of Glock and Stark, gauges individuals’ religious beliefs and attitudes across four dimensions—belief, emotional, consequential, and ritual—yielding a total score range of 0 to 104. The Spiritual Well-Being Scale developed by Paloutzian and Ellison is a 20-item self-report instrument assessing two dimensions of spiritual health: religious well-being and existential well-being, with a total score range of 20 to 120. In the present study, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients indicated acceptable reliability for all three instruments, with the Volunteer Functions Inventory reaching 0.98, the Religiosity Questionnaire 0.93, and the Spiritual Well-Being Scale 0.88.

The results revealed a significant positive correlation between the total score of volunteer functions and both spiritual health and religiosity. The correlation between volunteer functions and spiritual health was 0.26, while the correlation with religiosity was notably stronger at 0.40. Respondents with higher spiritual health and religiosity exhibited higher levels of volunteer functions. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation was observed between spiritual health and religiosity themselves, at 0.48. The majority of respondents demonstrated moderate levels of spiritual health and religiosity: 67.9 percent fell into the moderate category for spiritual health, and 70.1 percent for religiosity. The mean age of respondents was 29.87 years, with 63.9 percent female, 53.1 percent married, and 52.2 percent holding a bachelor’s degree.

Multiple linear regression analysis showed that, after controlling for socio-demographic variables including age, gender, education level, and marital status, both spiritual health and religiosity independently and significantly predicted the total volunteering function score. Spiritual health was positively and significantly associated with volunteering functions, with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.402 and a p-value of 0.021. Religiosity emerged as an even stronger positive predictor, with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.801 and a p-value below 0.001. Among the socio-demographic variables, only education level showed a significant negative effect, such that higher educational levels were associated with significantly lower volunteering function scores. In contrast, age, gender, and marital status were not significantly related to volunteering functions. The final regression model accounted for approximately 21 percent of the variance in volunteering function scores, and the overall model was statistically significant.

The demographic analysis revealed additional patterns. A weak but significant association was found between age and religiosity, suggesting that religiosity increases with age—a trend consistent with some studies observing an increase in religiosity in later life stages, which may be linked to accumulated life experiences and a heightened search for meaning during these periods. Women exhibited significantly higher levels of religiosity and spiritual health compared to men, and married respondents showed significantly higher levels of religiosity than single respondents. These differences may be influenced by gender-related socialization patterns, gender roles, and participation in religious social networks, while marital status may enhance engagement with religious and spiritual values through increased family responsibilities and social integration. However, the researchers noted that although these differences were statistically significant, the magnitude of associations was relatively small to moderate rather than strong.

The finding that higher education levels were associated with lower levels of spiritual well-being, religiosity, and volunteer functions warrants careful interpretation. The researchers suggested this pattern may reflect differences in how individuals with varying educational backgrounds engage with religion and spirituality. Secularization theory has often been used to explain this association, suggesting that higher education and modernization may expose individuals to broader worldviews and critical thinking perspectives, which can be accompanied by a gradual decline in traditional religious involvement. However, this relationship is not universal and appears to be context-dependent, influenced by cultural setting, measurement approaches, and individual differences. The correlation coefficients ranged from approximately negative 0.11 to negative 0.19, indicating weak but consistent trends that warrant further investigation rather than strong causal or deterministic interpretations.

The researchers acknowledged that spiritual health and religiosity overlap conceptually, and that this overlap might influence the observed relationships. While related, these two concepts are distinct: spiritual health generally refers to a broad sense of meaning, connection, and existential well-being, whereas religiosity is more about how closely someone follows religious beliefs, rituals, and practices. Previous research has shown that although these areas are correlated, they are generally considered distinct constructs capturing different aspects of people’s inner lives and behaviors. The instruments utilized in this study are grounded in established theory and have been validated as measuring distinct constructs, which mitigates the risk of confounding. The magnitude of the observed associations is consistent with prior empirical reports, suggesting the results do not arise solely from conceptual overlap. Nonetheless, some shared variance is inevitable when studying closely related psychosocial concepts, and future research could benefit from using more precise or multidimensional measures to more clearly differentiate between spiritual health and religiosity.

Several limitations constrain the interpretation of these findings. Owing to the cross-sectional design, causal inferences cannot be drawn; as data were collected at a single point in time, only associations—not causal relationships—between religiosity or spiritual health and volunteering can be inferred. Social desirability bias remains a potential concern, as respondents may overreport religious devotion owing to its socially valued status, though anonymity mitigated this risk. Additionally, socioeconomic status and prior volunteer experience were not assessed and therefore could not be included as covariates in the regression models. These variables are known to be associated with both religiosity and volunteering behavior, and their omission could potentially confound the observed associations. Several secondary bivariate analyses were also conducted without formal adjustment for multiple comparisons, meaning the possibility of Type I error inflation cannot be completely excluded.

The cultural context of these findings deserves particular attention. In individualistic countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia, volunteering is often driven by personal goals such as learning new skills, self-development, and career growth. In contrast, in collectivist societies like India, Japan, and China, motivation tends to come from ethical and social values, such as supporting the community, sharing responsibility, and following religious norms. The researchers cautioned that care is warranted when generalizing these findings to culturally different populations. Within the specific context of a religiously oriented society like Iran, however, the results suggest that religious beliefs, practices, and broader dimensions of spiritual well-being may contribute meaningfully to volunteer functions. Prior research has also emphasized that combining religion with active spiritual practices—like prayer, meditation, gratitude, and quiet reflection—has a stronger effect on volunteering than simply following religious doctrines, and that the social side of religiosity, such as joining collective rituals and being part of religious communities, is especially powerful in motivating volunteer behavior.

Looking forward, the researchers recommend longitudinal and prospective studies to clarify the direction and mechanisms of the relationships between spiritual and religious dimensions and volunteering behavior. Future research should also incorporate comprehensive measures of socioeconomic background and volunteer history to better isolate the unique contributions of religiosity and spiritual health to volunteer functions. The results indicate that demographic factors, particularly educational level, may be associated with differences in volunteer functions and should be considered in future research and program development. For health systems in Iran and similar contexts that depend heavily on volunteer networks to deliver community health services, understanding these motivational foundations could prove essential for sustaining the volunteer workforce upon which primary care delivery increasingly relies.

Subject of Research: Associations between religiosity, spiritual health, and volunteer functions among community health volunteers in Iran

Article Title: Religiosity, spiritual health, and volunteer functions among health volunteers in Saveh, Iran: A cross-sectional study

Article References: Arab, F., Khademi, S., & Saeedi, M. (2026). Religiosity, spiritual health, and volunteer functions among health volunteers in Saveh, Iran: A cross-sectional study. Heliyon, 12(16), Article e45585. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45585

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45585

Keywords: religiosity, spiritual health, volunteer functions, health volunteers, Iran, cross-sectional study, volunteer motivation, primary health care, Women Health Volunteers, community health, psychology of religion, Heliyon

The framework, called the sacred speech–psychological internalisation model (SSPIM), was developed by Bandara Bandaranayake, an independent researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. Presented as a heuristic rather than a tested theory, the model draws together insights from speech act theory, the sociology and psychology of religion, attachment theory, and research on psychological internalisation. Its central claim is that under particular developmental, relational, and cultural conditions, sacred language acquires existential significance, becomes emotionally encoded in memory, is reinforced by religious communities, and is gradually internalised as lasting patterns of conscience, compassion, shame, and moral identity. In other words, the words of spiritual authority do not merely instruct; they can become part of the psychological architecture of the self.

The intellectual scaffolding of the model begins with speech act theory, the philosophical tradition inaugurated by J. L. Austin and elaborated by John Searle, which established that language does not simply describe reality but performs actions within it. A judge’s sentence, a officiant’s declaration of marriage, or a priest’s absolution changes social reality through the act of speaking, provided the speaker holds recognised authority and the hearer accepts the institutional context. Sacred speech, the model argues, represents an especially potent class of performative language because its presumed authority derives not merely from institutional office but from the claimed mediation of ultimate reality. When a religious leader declares something sacred, forbidden, forgiven, or defiled, the utterance carries a weight that ordinary commands cannot replicate, because it appears to connect the listener’s finite life to transcendent order.

Sociological and psychological perspectives on religion supply the second pillar. From Émile Durkheim’s analysis of religion as a collective phenomenon that generates shared emotional energy, to Max Weber’s account of charismatic religious authority, to more recent anthropological work such as Tanya Luhrmann’s studies of how evangelical Christians learn to experience God as communicative, researchers have documented how communities and institutions amplify the force of sacred words. The SSPIM incorporates these insights by emphasising that sacred speech is rarely encountered in isolation. It arrives embedded in ritual, repetition, music, communal assent, and the visible reverence of others, all of which deepen its emotional encoding. Research on emotionally charged memory, including Joseph LeDoux’s work on the amygdala and Elizabeth Phelps’s studies of amygdala-hippocampus interactions, suggests why such linguistically delivered experiences may be stored with unusual durability: words that arrive wrapped in awe, fear, joy, or communal fervour are prioritised by the memory systems that tag experiences as significant.

Attachment theory provides the model’s third foundation. Studies by Pehr Granqvist and Lee Kirkpatrick have shown that religious belief and conversion often follow patterns analogous to attachment relationships, with God or sacred figures functioning as attachment figures who offer security, comfort, and a felt presence. The SSPIM extends this logic to sacred speech itself: words spoken by a spiritually authoritative figure can be experienced the way a child experiences a caregiver’s voice, carrying signals of safety or threat that are absorbed pre-reflectively. This relational encoding helps explain, the model suggests, why a phrase of divine forgiveness spoken by a trusted pastor can dissolve guilt in moments, while a phrase of divine condemnation delivered by the same authority can install a chronic sense of unworthiness that persists long after the person has left the community.

The model’s most distinctive contribution is its account of internalisation, the process by which external voices become internal ones. Drawing on classical and contemporary theories of how children absorb parental prohibitions and values into conscience, the SSPIM proposes a staged pathway. Sacred language first acquires existential significance when the listener perceives it as bearing on ultimate matters such as salvation, moral standing, or life’s meaning. It is then emotionally encoded, tagged with the affect present at the moment of reception. Religious communities subsequently reinforce the encoded message through liturgy, teaching, and social confirmation. Over time, the external voice falls silent, and its content persists as an inner moral presence: a conscience that condemns or absolves, a compassionate orientation toward others, a shame response to perceived transgression, or a stable sense of moral identity. Crucially, this process is not confined to childhood. Adults in periods of crisis, conversion, or heightened receptivity appear capable of the same deep internalisation of sacred speech.

Bandaranayake frames the divergent outcomes of this process using the concepts of spiritual placebo and spiritual nocebo effects. On the adaptive pathway, internalised sacred speech functions as a spiritual placebo: it fosters resilience, meaning-making, compassion, and moral confidence. The literature on religion, spirituality, and health, including Harold Koenig’s reviews and Crystal Park’s work on meaning-making after stressful events, documents associations between benevolent religious framing and improved psychological adjustment. Words of unconditional love, forgiveness, and worthiness, once internalised, can operate as enduring psychological resources, comparable in function to a secure internal working model of a loving caregiver. Research on divine forgiveness by Frank Fincham and colleagues, and on spiritually integrated psychotherapy by Kenneth Pargament, illustrates how such internalised benevolent speech can be therapeutically mobilised.

On the maladaptive pathway, the same mechanism becomes a spiritual nocebo. Sacred speech that emphasises condemnation, impurity, or perpetual danger can be internalised as chronic shame, anxiety, scrupulosity, and diminished personal agency. The psychology of shame and guilt, notably June Tangney and Rhonda Dearing’s distinction between shame as a global condemnation of the self and guilt as a focused assessment of behaviour, helps clarify why religiously framed messages that target the whole person, rather than specific acts, are particularly corrosive. Clinical literature on religious and spiritual struggles, including work by Julie Exline and Pargament, links such struggles to depression, anxiety, and diminished wellbeing, while scholarship on spiritual abuse by Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond and on trauma-attentive spiritual repair by L. Kalvari documents the harm that can follow when authority is exercised coercively. The model thus treats the same psychological process as capable of producing either flourishing or pathology, depending on the content, context, and relational quality of the sacred speech involved.

To ground the framework, the article draws illustrative examples from Christianity and Buddhism, while insisting that its focus is psychological rather than doctrinal. Christian practices of absolution, blessing, and preaching demonstrate how authoritative sacred speech can be internalised as forgiveness or as crippling guilt, and devotional traditions in which believers cultivate a conversational relationship with God show the endpoint of internalisation: the external authoritative voice becomes an experienced inner interlocutor. Buddhist traditions offer a complementary case, in which the spoken teachings of the Buddha and of living teachers, along with recited texts and formal refuges, function as authoritative speech that practitioners internalise as ethical orientation and meditative attitude, with compassion and mindfulness as the intended fruits. The article emphasises that the mechanisms under study concern human psychology, not the truth claims of any tradition.

The SSPIM is offered explicitly as a springboard for empirical research rather than a finished scientific account. The author proposes that future studies could test the model’s stages experimentally and longitudinally, examining how perceived spiritual authority, emotional context, community reinforcement, and attachment history predict the depth and valence of internalisation, and how internalised sacred speech relates to measures of conscience, shame, scrupulosity, resilience, and moral identity. Practical implications are outlined for pastoral care, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, and religious leadership: caregivers and clinicians may benefit from attending to the specific sacred sentences clients carry within them, since reframing or repairing those internalised utterances may be as therapeutically important as addressing early caregiver relationships. Religious leaders, for their part, are reminded that their words are never merely informational; spoken under recognised authority and received within communities of trust, they are quite literally formative, capable of building consciences and compassion or of installing burdens that last a lifetime. As research on the psychology of religion continues to mature, the framework suggests that one of its most important objects of study may be the simplest of all: the sentence spoken in earnest, from a place of sacred authority, into an open human heart.

Subject of Research: The psychological internalisation of sacred speech and the adaptive and maladaptive effects of spiritual authority

Article Title: Sacred Speech and Psychological Internalisation: Understanding the Psychological Power of Spiritual Authority

Article References: Bandaranayake, B. (2026). Sacred Speech and Psychological Internalisation: Understanding the Psychological Power of Spiritual Authority. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01370-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01370-3

Keywords: sacred language, spiritual authority, psychology of religion, internalisation, speech act theory, attachment theory, moral identity, shame, scrupulosity, pastoral psychology, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, meaning-making

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