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 2022-06-01 to 2026-06-01.)

Article	Citations
Building better models: a cultural immunology approach	73
Are the religious make-believing, or are they making themselves believe?	64
Scripture’s systemic imagination	28
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	27
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	25
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	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
Rational atheism revisited: a comment on Disbelief by Will Gervais	7
How to understand a research question—a challenging first step in setting up a statistical model	7
Commentary to MARP: how to increase the robustness of survey studies	7
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity	7
Religion endures, but does it thrive?	7
Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)	7
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science	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
Multiple origins for the evolution of collective rituals	6
Where we go one we go all: CSR in the digital age	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
Response: Secularization with Irish characteristics	5

A need to better understand the evolutionary process of beliefs about gods’ concerns	5
Toward a cultural immunology of religious systems	5
Cultural dissonance and consonance in mystical-type experiences: commentary on “Finding consonance: an integrative neurocognitive model of human relationships with supernatural agents”	5
Kin selection favors religious traditions: ancestor worship as a cultural descendant-leaving strategy	5
Conscious evolution of the noösphere: hubris or necessity?	5
Mapping the minds of participants: relationality and cultural schemas	5
Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study	5
Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research	5
The economic – and anthropological? – view of supernatural institutions	4
Predictive processing all the way down	4
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
Rethinking the roots of human collective ritual	4
“I once was blind”: experimental manipulation of religious attitudes via choice blindness	4
God, witchcraft, and beliefs about illness in Mauritius	4
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	3
Extraordinary-high rank expectation as a cognitive predisposition forming religion	3
Where does CSR go from here?	3
A contemporary interpretation of Teilhard’s law of complexity-consciousness	3
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence	3
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	3
Prayer as collaborative problem solving	3
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: response to commentators	3
Social interaction spheres, the self, and the meanings of “prediction”	3
The role of religion in adolescent mental health: faith as a moderator of the relationship between distrust and depression	3
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	3
The evolution of religiosity by kin selection	3
Broadening the scope and refining the precision of theistic relational spirituality	3
The promises and pitfalls of facilitated spiritual experiences for the study of religion	3
Less egocentric and a bit more allocentric—the path to greater well-being?	2
Reflections on Patrick McNamara, religion, neuroscience, and the self: a new personalism	2
Corrected by collegial commentators: my beliefs about beliefs about Disbelief	2
Possession trance covaries with measures of social rigidity in the Ethnographic Atlas	2
The poverty of contentless culture	2
Identifying and validating the “varieties” of spiritual experience	2
Keep the black box open: a case for complex and continuous representationalism	2
From drowning to debunking: the cognitive science of religion's role in unraveling religious beliefs	2
Reintroducing the direction of evolution	2
Linking ritual transmission with the psychology of norm acquisition	2
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform	2
Instrumentality, empiricism, and rationality in Nuosu divination	2
Editorial note	2