OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Religion Brain & Behavior is 1. 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 2022-08-01 to 2026-08-01.)

Article	Citations
Building better models: a cultural immunology approach	66
Are the religious make-believing, or are they making themselves believe?	30
Scripture’s systemic imagination	26
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	12
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	11
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	9
Local concerns aren’t always local: a broader view of local social ecologies provides greater explanatory power	8
An integrative neurocognitive model of human relations with supernatural agents, commentary to Balch, Grafman and McNamara	8
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity	7
Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)	7
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science	6
Religion endures, but does it thrive?	6
Are cultures immune systems or blueprints of a systemic design?	6
Rational atheism revisited: a comment on Disbelief by Will Gervais	6
Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study	5
Mapping the minds of participants: relationality and cultural schemas	5
Where we go one we go all: CSR in the digital age	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
Frontal asymmetry and physiological responses in religious and spiritual problems with and without conversion	5
Kin selection favors religious traditions: ancestor worship as a cultural descendant-leaving strategy	4
A need to better understand the evolutionary process of beliefs about gods’ concerns	4
Response: Secularization with Irish characteristics	4
Toward a cultural immunology of religious systems	4
Predictive processing all the way down	3

Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research	3
“I once was blind”: experimental manipulation of religious attitudes via choice blindness	3
Prayer as collaborative problem solving	3
Rethinking the roots of human collective ritual	3
Formalized rituals may have preceded the emergence of religions	3
God, witchcraft, and beliefs about illness in Mauritius	3
Conscious evolution of the noösphere: hubris or necessity?	3
The economic – and anthropological? – view of supernatural institutions	3
The varieties of nonreligious experience: meaning in life among believers, non-believers, and the spiritual but not religious	3
The role of religion in adolescent mental health: faith as a moderator of the relationship between distrust and depression	2
Broadening the scope and refining the precision of theistic relational spirituality	2
Extraordinary-high rank expectation as a cognitive predisposition forming religion	2
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	2
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	2
Where does CSR go from here?	2
Social interaction spheres, the self, and the meanings of “prediction”	2
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence	2
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	2
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: response to commentators	2
Mapping the minds of spectators during an extreme ritual: a network perspective	1
Impact of faith maturity on mental health and wellbeing	1
Collective action in wild chimpanzees provides further insight into the evolution of cooperative ritual behavior	1
Galton's problem and the limits of functionalism	1
Maternal religiosity and social support to mothers: helpers’ religious identity matters	1
Instrumentality, empiricism, and rationality in Nuosu divination	1
Keep the black box open: a case for complex and continuous representationalism	1
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform	1
Linking ritual transmission with the psychology of norm acquisition	1
Harnessing the power of rituals: suggestions for future work	1
Shifting themes in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion	1
On evidential vulnerability and compartmentalization	1
Religion’s Hilbert problems, ten years later: progress, pitfalls, and new horizons	1
Computation of identity and social volatility in the ritual animal	1
Editorial note	1
Corrected by collegial commentators: my beliefs about beliefs about Disbelief	1
A contemporary interpretation of Teilhard’s law of complexity-consciousness	1
Identifying and validating the “varieties” of spiritual experience	1
Possession trance covaries with measures of social rigidity in the Ethnographic Atlas	1
Shamanic and doctrinal: Dunbar and the spiritual turn in contemporary religion	1
Costly ritualized actions induce trust in young children	1
Atheism studies lives up to its own hype: marginal notes on Gervais's Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species	1
Military sociality may recreate the nurture sphere at higher social strata	1
Gradualist change or sudden collapse? Religious decline and residual religiosity in Ireland	1
From drowning to debunking: the cognitive science of religion's role in unraveling religious beliefs	1
Reintroducing the direction of evolution	1
Examining potential causal relationships between religiosity and prosocial values, and prosocial values and mental health, in young adulthood in a UK cohort study	1
Less egocentric and a bit more allocentric—the path to greater well-being?	1
The poverty of contentless culture	1