Leiden University, Cognitive Psychology Unit & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, the Netherlands; Scientific Institute, IRCCS E. Medea, Pasian di Prato, Udine, Italy.
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Society, University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
Neuroscience. 2019 Aug 1;412:144-159. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.05.059. Epub 2019 Jun 7.
Recently, the empirical interest in religiousness and spirituality has grown, showing the association between the activity of a complex network of subcortical and fronto-parietal areas and explicit and implicit religious/spiritual representations. Importantly, while the causal link between parietal stimulation and implicit religiousness/spirituality has been demonstrated, the role of subcortical and medial cortical areas has not been directly investigated. Here, we assessed how implicit and explicit religious or spiritual representations are modulated by transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation (tVNS), a novel non-invasive method to stimulate subcortical and medial cortical structures. Implicit and explicit representations were tested with Religious, Spiritual and Self-esteem (as control) Implicit Association Tests and questionnaires. Active-tVNS, compared to sham-tVNS, affected implicit spiritual, but not religious or control self-representations, reducing the strength of the automatic association between the self and the spiritual dimension. Explicit self-representations were left unchanged. Findings shed new light on the neurobiological mechanisms of implicit spirituality.
最近，对宗教信仰和精神性的实证研究兴趣日益浓厚，表明了皮质下和额顶区域复杂网络的活动与显性和隐性宗教/精神表现之间存在关联。重要的是，虽然已经证明了顶叶刺激与隐性宗教信仰/精神性之间的因果关系，但皮质下和内侧皮质区域的作用尚未被直接研究。在这里，我们评估了经皮迷走神经刺激（tVNS）如何调节隐性和显性宗教或精神表现，这是一种刺激皮质下和内侧皮质结构的新型非侵入性方法。通过宗教、精神和自尊（作为对照）的内隐联想测试和问卷调查来测试隐性和显性的表现。与假刺激相比，主动刺激 tVNS 影响了隐性的精神性，但不影响宗教或控制自我表现，降低了自我与精神维度之间自动联想的强度。显性自我表现保持不变。这些发现为隐性精神性的神经生物学机制提供了新的线索。
