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 2021-08-01 to 2025-08-01.)

Article	Citations
Beliefs, evolution, and psychiatric symptoms	54
Big comparison	40
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	21
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	20
How do culture and religion interact worldwide? A cultural match approach to understanding religiosity and well-being in the Many Analysts Religion Project	19
Scripture’s systemic imagination	18
Missing level of analysis?	16
Local concerns aren’t always local: a broader view of local social ecologies provides greater explanatory power	15
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science	14
Religion endures, but does it thrive?	11
An integrative neurocognitive model of human relations with supernatural agents, commentary to Balch, Grafman and McNamara	10
How to understand a research question—a challenging first step in setting up a statistical model	10
The emergence of MSP vs. the spread of transcendentalist religion	9
Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)	8
Commentary to MARP: how to increase the robustness of survey studies	8
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity	8
Commentary on Hearing voices and other matters of mind: What mental abnormalities teach us about religions by Robert McCauley and George Graham	7
Do religious and market-based institutions promote cooperation in Hadza hunter-gatherers?	6
Frontal asymmetry and physiological responses in religious and spiritual problems with and without conversion	6
Multiple origins for the evolution of collective rituals	6
Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study	6
From multiverse analysis to multiverse operationalisations: 262,143 ways of measuring well-being	6
Where we go one we go all: CSR in the digital age	6
Conscious evolution of the noösphere: hubris or necessity?	5
Mapping the minds of participants: relationality and cultural schemas	5

Coding, causality, and statistical craft: the emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved	5
Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research	5
Cultural dissonance and consonance in mystical-type experiences: commentary on “Finding consonance: an integrative neurocognitive model of human relationships with supernatural agents”	5
Response: Secularization with Irish characteristics	5
Henrich’s Weberian project	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
God, witchcraft, and beliefs about illness in Mauritius	4
The economic – and anthropological? – view of supernatural institutions	4
Prayer as collaborative problem solving	4
Faith and fertility in evolutionary perspective	4
The promises and pitfalls of facilitated spiritual experiences for the study of religion	3
The role of religion in adolescent mental health: faith as a moderator of the relationship between distrust and depression	3
Perceptions of moralizing agents and cooperative behavior in Northeastern Brazil	3
Causal inference in regression: advice to authors	3
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test	3
Where does CSR go from here?	3
The campaign against COVID-19 in Nigeria: exploring church leaders’ role perception and action	3
Formalized rituals may have preceded the emergence of religions	3
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	3
Diverse evolutionary strategies for explaining features of religions	3
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	3
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence	3
Rethinking the roots of human collective ritual	3
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	3
A contemporary interpretation of Teilhard’s law of complexity-consciousness	2
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: response to commentators	2
The evolution of religiosity by kin selection	2
The success story of the west, perceptual art, and the challenges of the Global East	2
Linking ritual transmission with the psychology of norm acquisition	2
What defines a person?	2
God is up and devil is down: mortality salience increases implicit spatial-religious associations	2
Fertility and faith: insights from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and life history theory	2
Depth vs. breadth: lessons from the Evolution of Religion and Morality project	2
Moving forward from “Fertility and Faith”	2
Identifying and validating the “varieties” of spiritual experience	2
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform	2
Keep the black box open: a case for complex and continuous representationalism	2
Reintroducing the direction of evolution	2
Broadening the scope and refining the precision of theistic relational spirituality	2
Extraordinary-high rank expectation as a cognitive predisposition forming religion	2
Less egocentric and a bit more allocentric—the path to greater well-being?	2
The puzzles that remain	2
Reflections on Patrick McNamara, religion, neuroscience, and the self: a new personalism	2
The poverty of contentless culture	2
Cigarettes for the dead: effects of sorcery beliefs on parochial prosociality in Mauritius	2