ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the literature on the relationship between religion or spirituality and health. In the past, largely due to the influence of a Freudian view of religion within psychology and psychiatry, religion was assumed to have a negative influence on mental health, and probably physical health as well. Religion, therefore, is considered to be community-focused, formal and organized, oriented toward behavior and practice, institutional and doctrinal. Spirituality is more individualistic, emotional and subjective, and less systematic, organized, authoritarian and doctrinal. The brains ability to see patterns and generate causal hypotheses is due to what is called an interpreter, located in the brains left hemisphere. Emotion is generated by a variety of brain structures located in the limbic system. A major structure responsible for emotion is the amygdala, but it works in conjunction with a number of other limbic areas such as the hypothalamus and hippocampus.
