Religious Cognition and Behaviour in Autism: The Role of Mentalizing

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Publikace nespadá pod Ekonomicko-správní fakultu, ale pod Filozofickou fakultu. Oficiální stránka publikace je na webu muni.cz.
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REDDISH Paul TOK SIEW LING Penny KUNDT Radek

Rok publikování 2016
Druh Článek v odborném periodiku
Časopis / Zdroj The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion
Fakulta / Pracoviště MU

Filozofická fakulta

Citace
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2014.1003518
Obor Filosofie a náboženství
Klíčová slova agency; anthropomorphism; asperger syndrome; autism spectrum disorders; behaviour; belief; cognitive science; mentalizing; prayer; religion; ritual; theory of mind
Popis Mentalizing, or theory of mind, has been argued to be critical for supporting religious beliefs and practices involving supernatural agents. As individuals with autism spectrum conditions have been found to have deficits in mentalizing, this raises the question as to how they may conceive of gods and behave in relation to gods. To examine this, we compared high functioning individuals with autism (HFA) to typically developing individuals across seven key aspects of religious cognition and behaviour: (1) strength of belief; (2) anthropomorphism of god concepts; (3) felt closeness towards the god; (4) prayer habits; (5) attraction to prayer; (6) efficacy of prayer; and (7) a sense of agency whilst praying. A battery of mentalizing tasks was administered to measure mentalizing ability, along with the Autism-Spectrum Quotient. As expected, typically developing subjects performed better than HFA subjects in the advanced mentalizing task. However, no statistically significant differences were found with first order and second order false belief tasks. In contrast to our predictions and previous research on the religiosity of HFA, we found very little differences between the groups in their religious cognition and behaviour. Moreover, the relationship between mentalizing ability and most of our measures of religious cognition and behaviour was weak and negative. Our data suggest that HFA's deficits in mentalizing appear to have only minimal impact on the way they interact and think about gods. We end the paper by re-evaluating the role mentalizing may have in religious cognition and behaviour.
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