Christians and Buddhists Are Comparably Happy on Twitter: A Large-Scale Linguistic Analysis of Religious Differences in Social, Cognitive, and Emotional Tendencies

The revival of spiritual practices: factors influencing the "seeking deities and offering prayers" behavior of China's Generation Z on social media in an atheistic context

Introduction

Over the past decade, there has been a growing focus on the study of how religion and technology intersect, particularly within the field of digital religion studies. In recent years, digital religious activities have emerged on Chinese social media platforms, with the sharing and promotion of content related to religious activities becoming increasingly popular. In a country like China, which adheres to atheistic ideology, the emergence of religious activities among the Generation Z youth provides a unique case for academic research. However, there is very limited research on digital religious behavior in mainland China. This study fills this gap by extending the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to predict additional influencing factors of digital religious intentions and behavior.

Methods

This study employed a quantitative design, disseminating surveys via Sina Weibo and the Douyin platform. We collected a total of 525 valid responses. This study aims to deeply explore the social and psychological factors generated by digital religious activities on social media platforms, particularly how they stimulate Chinese Generation Z youth to participate in digital religious activities.

Results

The results show that attitudes toward digital religion, perceived behavioral control, social identity, and empathetic willingness are predictors of intentions, while social norms are not. Intentions significantly predict users'behavior on social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin. Moreover, empathetic willingness and social identity fully mediate the effects of subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and attitudes on intentions. Consequently, these behaviors generate impact, indicating the presence of multiple mediation effects.

Discussion

Unlike the societal context of theistic nations, there is a pronounced atheistic inclination within Chinese society. Consequently, subjective norms do not influence the digital religious behaviors of Chinese youth. Among contemporary Chinese youth, participation in digital religious practices is a temporary, secular activity undertaken only as a comforting behavior when anxiety becomes unmanageable or surpasses their threshold of tolerance. In contemporary China, young people face immense pressures stemming from workplace competition, social interactions, and economic burdens. Social media offers these young individuals broader opportunities for connection, community formation, and identity construction, as well as various possibilities for organizing their social lives. Consequently, on one hand, they turn to online religious avenues, seeking understanding from others through shared experiences, thereby obtaining emotional solace and comfort. On the other hand, they look to spiritual beliefs to alleviate anxiety, resolve confusion, and gain psychological comfort through emotional exchanges. Therefore, digital religion can, to some extent, be viewed as a form of social-technological empowerment, providing contemporary youth with a new "pressure valve" to facilitate emotional relief, comfort, and tension alleviation.

Performing Multilingual Analysis With Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015). An Equivalence Study of Four Languages

Today, there is a range of computer-aided techniques to convert text into data. However, they convey not only strengths but also vulnerabilities compared to traditional content analysis. One of the challenges that have gained increasing attention is performing automatic language analysis to make sound inferences in a multilingual assessment setting. The current study is the first to test the equivalence of multiple versions of one of the most appealing and widely used lexicon-based tools worldwide, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015). For this purpose, we employed supervised learning in a classification problem and computed Pearson's correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients on a large corpus of parallel texts in English, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. Our findings suggested that LIWC2015 is a valuable tool for multilingual analysis, but within-language standardization is needed when the aim is to analyze texts sourced from different languages.

The Relationship between Psycholinguistic Features of Religious Words and Core Dimensions of Religiosity: A Survey Study with Japanese Participants

Previous studies have reported that religious words and religiosity affect mental processes and behaviors. However, it is unclear what psycholinguistic features of religious words (e.g., familiarity, imageability, and emotional aspects) are associated with each dimension of personal religiosity (intellect, ideology, public practice, private practice, and experience). The purpose of this study was to examine whether and how the above-mentioned psycholinguistic features of religious words correlate with each of the core dimensions of religiosity. Japanese participants evaluated four psycholinguistic features of twelve religious words using a 5-point Semantic Differential scale for familiarity and imageability and a 9-point Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale for emotional valence and emotional arousal. The participants also rated their own religiosity using the Japanese version of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (JCRS). The results of the study revealed that (1) the scales measuring the psycholinguistic features of religious words were statistically reliable; (2) the JCRS was reliable; (3) the familiarity, emotional valence, and emotional arousal of religious words and each mean dimensional score of the JCRS score correlated positively with each other; and (4) highly religious people had higher familiarity and higher emotional arousal to religious words than non-religious people, whereas highly religious people had higher emotional valence to religious words in comparison with non-religious and religious people. In addition, religious people had higher familiarity to religious words than non-religious people. Taken together, these findings suggest that psycholinguistic features of religious words contribute to the detection of religiosity.

East versus West: psychology of religion in East Asian cultures

Despite advancements in psychology of religion, most of what we know is derived from studies in Western Christian cultures. We review recent research investigating the impact of religion on various outcomes in East Asian cultural and religious contexts (versus Western Christian) including: religiosity components and measurement, health, personality, cognition and emotion, morality and values, and intergroup attitudes and behavior. While religion sometimes has similar effects across contexts (e.g. increased health, prosociality, and traditional values), the associations observed in Western contexts are often weaker or inexistent, especially in the moral domain. In some occasions, opposite effects of religion in East Asian contexts are observed (e.g. decreased prejudice). These observations suggest an interaction between religious and cultural factors.

Social Impact of Psychological Research on Well-Being Shared in Social Media

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the Social Impact in Social Media (SISM, hereinafter) methodology applied in psychological research provides evidence for the visibility of the social impact of the research. This article helps researchers become aware of whether and how their improvements are capturing the interest of citizens and how citizens are applying such evidence and obtaining better outcomes, in this case, in relation to well-being. In addition, citizens can access the latest evidence on social media and act as channels of communication between science and social or personal networks and, in doing so, they can improve the living conditions of others. This methodology is also useful for agencies that support researchers in psychology with financial assistance, which can use it to evaluate the social impact of the funds that they invest in research. In this article, the 10 studies on well-being were selected for analysis using the following criteria: their research results led to demonstrable improvement in well-being, and these improvements are presented on social media. We applied the social impact coverage ratio to identify the percentage of the social impact shared in social media in relation to the total amount of social media data collected. Finally, examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of the social impact of the research on well-being are presented.