OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Religion Brain & Behavior is 2. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2022-05-01 to 2026-05-01.)

Article	Citations
Building better models: a cultural immunology approach	70
Mystical dynamics: renewal, luminous light, and ego disintegration as key features associated with mystical oneness—a psychometric analysis using the PES100 in controlled psychedelic studies	61
Are the religious make-believing, or are they making themselves believe?	28
Scripture’s systemic imagination	27
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	24
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	24
How do culture and religion interact worldwide? A cultural match approach to understanding religiosity and well-being in the Many Analysts Religion Project	12
Missing level of analysis?	10
An integrative neurocognitive model of human relations with supernatural agents, commentary to Balch, Grafman and McNamara	8
Local concerns aren’t always local: a broader view of local social ecologies provides greater explanatory power	8
The emergence of MSP vs. the spread of transcendentalist religion	8
Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)	7
Religion endures, but does it thrive?	7
Commentary to MARP: how to increase the robustness of survey studies	7
Rational atheism revisited: a comment on Disbelief by Will Gervais	7
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity	7
Are cultures immune systems or blueprints of a systemic design?	6
From multiverse analysis to multiverse operationalisations: 262,143 ways of measuring well-being	6
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science	6
Where we go one we go all: CSR in the digital age	6
How to understand a research question—a challenging first step in setting up a statistical model	6
Frontal asymmetry and physiological responses in religious and spiritual problems with and without conversion	6
Coding, causality, and statistical craft: the emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved	5
Mapping the minds of participants: relationality and cultural schemas	5
Toward a cultural immunology of religious systems	5

Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research	5
Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study	5
Response: Secularization with Irish characteristics	5
A need to better understand the evolutionary process of beliefs about gods’ concerns	5
Kin selection favors religious traditions: ancestor worship as a cultural descendant-leaving strategy	5
Cultural dissonance and consonance in mystical-type experiences: commentary on “Finding consonance: an integrative neurocognitive model of human relationships with supernatural agents”	5
Multiple origins for the evolution of collective rituals	5
Conscious evolution of the noösphere: hubris or necessity?	5
Formalized rituals may have preceded the emergence of religions	4
The varieties of nonreligious experience: meaning in life among believers, non-believers, and the spiritual but not religious	4
The economic – and anthropological? – view of supernatural institutions	4
Prayer as collaborative problem solving	4
Rethinking the roots of human collective ritual	4
“I once was blind”: experimental manipulation of religious attitudes via choice blindness	3
Predictive processing all the way down	3
The role of religion in adolescent mental health: faith as a moderator of the relationship between distrust and depression	3
Where does CSR go from here?	3
The promises and pitfalls of facilitated spiritual experiences for the study of religion	3
God, witchcraft, and beliefs about illness in Mauritius	3
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	3
Extraordinary-high rank expectation as a cognitive predisposition forming religion	3
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: response to commentators	3
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	3
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence	3
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	3
Social interaction spheres, the self, and the meanings of “prediction”	3
The evolution of religiosity by kin selection	3
A contemporary interpretation of Teilhard’s law of complexity-consciousness	2
Less egocentric and a bit more allocentric—the path to greater well-being?	2
The puzzles that remain	2
Instrumentality, empiricism, and rationality in Nuosu divination	2
Reintroducing the direction of evolution	2
Reflections on Patrick McNamara, religion, neuroscience, and the self: a new personalism	2
Linking ritual transmission with the psychology of norm acquisition	2
Identifying and validating the “varieties” of spiritual experience	2
Corrected by collegial commentators: my beliefs about beliefs about Disbelief	2
The poverty of contentless culture	2
Broadening the scope and refining the precision of theistic relational spirituality	2
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform	2
What defines a person?	2
From drowning to debunking: the cognitive science of religion's role in unraveling religious beliefs	2
Keep the black box open: a case for complex and continuous representationalism	2