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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Consciousness Research
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1557796
This article is part of the Research Topic Spirituality and Religion: Implications for Mental Health View all 36 articles
Neural correlates of religious behavior related to Christianity: an ALE meta-analysis
Provisionally accepted- 1 University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
- 2 Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China
Background: Multiple neuroimaging studies have been published to report brain processing of religious behavior related to Christianity, such as prayer and recitation of the Bible. This metaanalysis aimed to pool data across studies to identify brain regions consistently activated in response to such religious tasks.Methods: Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed were queried to identify relevant studies.Brain coordinates and sample size were manually extracted from the identified studies, and entered into a dedicated software called GingerALE to conduct meta-analysis.Results: Meta-analytic results based on 11 studies showed that brain processing of Christian behavior was associated with the right middle frontal gyrus and superior frontal gyrus, with a peak location (at 44, 38, 26; cluster size = 760 mm 3 ) preferentially associated with working memory, cognitive task, and executive function according to Neurosynth data. Sub-analyses on Christian subject data revealed no significant results at the pre-defined threshold. With a more liberal threshold, Christian tasks > non-Christian tasks showed activation in the anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus (peak at 4, 48, -4; cluster size = 256 mm 3 ) that were frequently associated with reward, self-referential, and reinforcement learning, whereas non-Christian tasks > Christian tasks showed activation in the right middle frontal gyrus (peak at 48, 36, 24; cluster size = 472 mm 3 ) that frequently associated with working memory, executive function, arithmetic, and calculation. Conclusion: This study has revealed the relevance of frontal and limbic regions to Christian behavior.
Keywords: fMRI, CBMA, activation likelihood estimation, Meta-analysis, Christianity, Religiosity
Received: 09 Jan 2025; Accepted: 20 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yeung, Wong, Tsui and Lee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Andy Wai Kan Yeung, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
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