PMID- 18633851
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20081210
LR  - 20091211
IS  - 1747-0927 (Electronic)
IS  - 1747-0919 (Linking)
VI  - 3
IP  - 1
DP  - 2008
TI  - Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing.
PG  - 1-15
LID - 10.1080/17470910701469681 [doi]
AB  - Christianity strongly encourages its believers to surrender to God and to judge 
      the self from God's perspective. We used functional MRI to assess whether this 
      religious belief is associated with neural correlates of self-referential 
      processing distinct from that of non-religious people. Non-religious and 
      Christian participants were scanned while performing tasks of personal-trait 
      judgments regarding the self or public persons. We found that, while 
      self-judgment was linked to better memory of traits related to the self than to 
      others, self-referential processing induced increased activity in the ventral 
      medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) for non-religious participants but in the dorsal 
      MPFC for Christian participants. In addition, the dorsal MPFC activity was 
      positively correlated with the rating scores of the importance of Jesus' judgment 
      in subjective evaluation of a person's personality. Because the ventral and 
      dorsal MPFC are respectively engaged in representation of stimulus self-relevance 
      and evaluation of self-referential stimuli, our findings suggest that Christian 
      beliefs result in weakened neural coding of stimulus self-relatedness but 
      enhanced neural activity underlying evaluative processes applied to 
      self-referential stimuli.
FAU - Han, Shihui
AU  - Han S
AD  - Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China. shan@pku.edu.cn
FAU - Mao, Lihua
AU  - Mao L
FAU - Gu, Xiaosi
AU  - Gu X
FAU - Zhu, Ying
AU  - Zhu Y
FAU - Ge, Jianqiao
AU  - Ge J
FAU - Ma, Yina
AU  - Ma Y
LA  - eng
PT  - Comparative Study
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
PL  - England
TA  - Soc Neurosci
JT  - Social neuroscience
JID - 101279009
SB  - IM
MH  - Adult
MH  - Brain Mapping/methods
MH  - Christianity/psychology
MH  - *Ego
MH  - Female
MH  - Humans
MH  - Judgment/*physiology
MH  - Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods
MH  - Male
MH  - Nerve Net/physiology
MH  - Prefrontal Cortex/*physiology
MH  - *Religion
EDAT- 2008/07/18 09:00
MHDA- 2008/12/17 09:00
CRDT- 2008/07/18 09:00
PHST- 2008/07/18 09:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2008/12/17 09:00 [medline]
PHST- 2008/07/18 09:00 [entrez]
AID - 791474582 [pii]
AID - 10.1080/17470910701469681 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - Soc Neurosci. 2008;3(1):1-15. doi: 10.1080/17470910701469681.