Division of Adolescent Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
Massachusetts Institution of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Oct 15;12(1):17305. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-22299-6.
Parental religious beliefs and practices (religiosity) may have profound effects on youth, especially in neurodevelopmentally complex periods such as adolescence. In n = 5566 children (median age = 120.0 months; 52.1% females; 71.2% with religious affiliation) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, relationships between parental religiosity and non-religious beliefs on family values (data on youth beliefs were not available), topological properties of youth resting-state brain networks, and executive function, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility were investigated. Lower caregiver education and family income were associated with stronger parental beliefs (p < 0.01). Strength of both belief types was correlated with lower efficiency, community structure, and robustness of frontoparietal control, temporoparietal, and dorsal attention networks (p < 0.05), and lower Matrix Reasoning scores. Stronger religious beliefs were negatively associated (directly and indirectly) with multiscale properties of salience and default-mode networks, and lower Flanker and Dimensional Card Sort scores, but positively associated with properties of the precuneus. Overall, these effects were small (Cohen's d ~ 0.2 to ~ 0.4). Overlapping neuromodulatory and cognitive effects of parental beliefs suggest that early adolescents may perceive religious beliefs partly as context-independent rules on expected behavior. However, religious beliefs may also differentially affect cognitive flexibility, attention, and inhibitory control and their neural substrates.
父母的宗教信仰和实践（宗教信仰）可能对青少年产生深远的影响，尤其是在神经发育复杂的时期，如青春期。在来自青少年大脑认知发展研究的 n=5566 名儿童（中位数年龄=120.0 个月；女性占 52.1%；71.2%有宗教信仰）中，研究了父母的宗教信仰与家庭价值观的非宗教信仰（没有关于青少年信仰的数据）、青少年静息态大脑网络的拓扑性质以及执行功能、抑制控制和认知灵活性之间的关系。看护者的教育程度和家庭收入较低与父母的强烈信仰有关（p<0.01）。这两种信仰类型的强度都与较低的效率、社区结构和前额顶控制、颞顶和背侧注意网络的稳健性（p<0.05）以及较低的矩阵推理分数相关。较强的宗教信仰与突显和默认模式网络的多尺度性质以及较低的 Flanker 和维度卡片分类分数呈负相关（直接和间接），但与楔前叶的性质呈正相关。总的来说，这些影响很小（Cohen's d0.2 到0.4）。父母信仰的重叠神经调节和认知效应表明，早期青少年可能将宗教信仰部分视为对预期行为的独立于情境的规则。然而，宗教信仰也可能对认知灵活性、注意力和抑制控制及其神经基础产生不同的影响。
