Psychology professor links religion to health
The link between religiosity and health seems to have manifest itself.
According to findings in a study conducted by Kevin Masters, a psychology professor at Utah State University, and USU psychology students, there seems to be a positive correlation between people who are intrinsically religious and their cardiovascular response in stress-induced situations.
Masters’ findings have landed his research top billing at the 110th annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Chicago this August. This is the biggest convention for psychologists, he said.
“It sounds like it struck a chord,” Masters said.
Since about March 2001, Masters said he has been doing research on the link between religion and health. He said researchers across the United States have hypotheses but no research to validate findings.
All that changed at USU.
Masters said a grant proposal he wrote to the National Institute on Aging was accepted for $70,000 in order for him to carry out laboratory research.
Four groups of people were tracked – both an older and younger population of the types intrinsically and extrinsically religious. He said intrinsically religious people see their belief as an end, and extrinsically religious people don’t have their belief as a core. Therefore, they may be more socially-oriented, follow family pressure or are religious merely out of habit.
“The avenue we took is that maybe religiosity [being religious] provides a sense of a meaning of life and a way of relating to people,” Masters said.
Two stress tests were given to participants, one of which was a complex arithmetic problem. Masters said each person’s heart rate and blood pressure were measured during the tests. He said results for that test were as expected – the younger group responded with a lower heart rate than the older group, with no disparities resulting due to religiosity.
However, Masters said the second test, which involved interacting with another person, showed a great difference between people who claimed to be intrinsically religious and those classified as extrinsically religious.
“There was less stress response for the intrinsically religious,” Masters said.
He said blood pressure of the extrinsically religious increased by an average of 30 points more than normal stress levels as compared to the intrinsically religious.
Since stress causes some of the biggest health problems to the heart and cardiovascular system, these results are significant, Masters said.
Masters said people were divided into the two categories after filling out a 20-item questionnaire that asks people to be aware of the reasons for their behavior.
“That’s asking a lot,” Masters said.
He said oftentimes people don’t think about why they do things. There could be a variety of things, ranging from personal conviction, combined with family pressure to doing things friends do, he said.
The research project had the benefit of receiving $15,000 to $20,000 in research equipment which was donated by one of Masters’ colleagues at the University of Utah. There were two graduate psychology students and five or six undergraduates working on the research, Masters said. The two graduate students will be doing their master’s theses on different aspects of the research, he said.
Masters said he hopes to follow up the research with larger studies and possibly in a non-laboratory setting.