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 2021-09-01 to 2025-09-01.)

Article	Citations
Beliefs, evolution, and psychiatric symptoms	54
Big comparison	45
Beyond the border: advancing the study of Catholic identities and orthopraxic religion in Southern and Northern Ireland	21
Building better models: a cultural immunology approach	20
The interaction between forgiveness and resentment on mental health outcomes: two sides of the same coin?	19
How do culture and religion interact worldwide? A cultural match approach to understanding religiosity and well-being in the Many Analysts Religion Project	18
Scripture’s systemic imagination	17
Missing level of analysis?	16
Local concerns aren’t always local: a broader view of local social ecologies provides greater explanatory power	14
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science	12
Religion endures, but does it thrive?	11
How to understand a research question—a challenging first step in setting up a statistical model	10
An integrative neurocognitive model of human relations with supernatural agents, commentary to Balch, Grafman and McNamara	9
The emergence of MSP vs. the spread of transcendentalist religion	8
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	7
Are cultures immune systems or blueprints of a systemic design?	7
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
Frontal asymmetry and physiological responses in religious and spiritual problems with and without conversion	6
Commentary on Hearing voices and other matters of mind: What mental abnormalities teach us about religions by Robert McCauley and George Graham	6
Do religious and market-based institutions promote cooperation in Hadza hunter-gatherers?	6
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

From multiverse analysis to multiverse operationalisations: 262,143 ways of measuring well-being	5
Conscious evolution of the noösphere: hubris or necessity?	5
Henrich’s Weberian project	5
Coding, causality, and statistical craft: the emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved	5
Mapping the minds of participants: relationality and cultural schemas	5
Where we go one we go all: CSR in the digital age	5
A need to better understand the evolutionary process of beliefs about gods’ concerns	4
Response: Secularization with Irish characteristics	4
Kin selection favors religious traditions: ancestor worship as a cultural descendant-leaving strategy	4
Prayer as collaborative problem solving	4
Toward a cultural immunology of religious systems	4
God, witchcraft, and beliefs about illness in Mauritius	4
Perceptions of moralizing agents and cooperative behavior in Northeastern Brazil	3
The campaign against COVID-19 in Nigeria: exploring church leaders’ role perception and action	3
Causal inference in regression: advice to authors	3
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test	3
Rethinking the roots of human collective ritual	3
Faith and fertility in evolutionary perspective	3
Predictive processing all the way down	3
Comparing the three states of Dhikr, meditation, and thinking about God: an fMRI study	3
Diverse evolutionary strategies for explaining features of religions	3
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction, evolution, emergence	3
Formalized rituals may have preceded the emergence of religions	3
Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards	3
A systematic review of the association between religiousness and children’s prosociality	3
The role of religion in adolescent mental health: faith as a moderator of the relationship between distrust and depression	3
The economic – and anthropological? – view of supernatural institutions	3
Extraordinary-high rank expectation as a cognitive predisposition forming religion	2
Cultural evolution of gods’ minds: response to commentators	2
Where does CSR go from here?	2
Fertility and faith: insights from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and life history theory	2
Less egocentric and a bit more allocentric—the path to greater well-being?	2
A contemporary interpretation of Teilhard’s law of complexity-consciousness	2
Cigarettes for the dead: effects of sorcery beliefs on parochial prosociality in Mauritius	2
Moving forward from “Fertility and Faith”	2
The promises and pitfalls of facilitated spiritual experiences for the study of religion	2
Broadening the scope and refining the precision of theistic relational spirituality	2
Reflections on Patrick McNamara, religion, neuroscience, and the self: a new personalism	2
The puzzles that remain	2
Keep the black box open: a case for complex and continuous representationalism	2
The evolution of human ritual behavior as a cooperative signaling platform	2
Social interaction spheres, the self, and the meanings of “prediction”	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
Depth vs. breadth: lessons from the Evolution of Religion and Morality project	2
Identifying and validating the “varieties” of spiritual experience	2
What defines a person?	2
Linking ritual transmission with the psychology of norm acquisition	2