Farid Pazhoohi

The Effect of Religious Clothing on Gaze Behavior : An Eye-Tracking Experiment

ABSTRACT There are very few experimental studies regarding religious clothing. In the current study, we hypothesized that the function of conservative clothing hiding female curvaceous body features is to restrict visual access and consequently decreases female physical attractiveness. Using eye-tracking, we quantified dwell times and number of fixations on religious clothing, ranging from conservative to liberal. Results showed that conservative religious clothing decreased visual access to female curvaceous body features and instead focused visual attention to the head/face region. Results were discussed in terms of the roles of conservative clothing in women’s clothing choice, men’s mate retention tactics, and parent-offspring conflict over mate choice.

Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality

Europes Journal of Psychology, 2018, Vol. 14(2), 515–518, doi:10.5964/ejop.v14i2.1589 Published (VoR): 2018-06-19. *Corresponding author at: Human Cognition Laboratory, School of Psychology, University of Minho, 4710 – 057 Braga, Portugal. E-mail: pazhoohi@gmail.com This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Effect of Religious Day on Prosocial Behavior: A Field Study

ABSTRACT It has previously been suggested that prosociality is correlated with the degree of religiousness. However, experimental and meta-analytical studies cast doubt on the existence of such a relationship. Due to the controversy over the link between religiousness and prosocial behavior, and the existence of only a small number of ecological experiments focusing on this relationship, we tested the effect of a religious salient day, a previously uninvestigated effect, on prosocial behavior. Specifically, across two experiments (N = 405) and in an ecological setting in Portugal, we tested whether prosocial behavior would increase on a religious salient day compared to a non-religious regular day. We found a gender-related effect: Women, on a religious day, were more inclined to agree to a prosocial behavior than on a non-religious day, whereas men did not change their behavior. We discuss such a difference in behavior, as well as the implications of our studies.