Background: Religiously motivated Bahá'í fasting (BF) is a form of intermittent dry fasting celebrated by abstaining from food and drinks during daylight hours every year in March for 19 consecutive days.Aim: To test the safety and effects of BF on hydration, metabolism, and the circadian clock.Methods: Thirty-four healthy Bahá'í volunteers (15 women) participated in this prospective, exploratory cohort study. Laboratory examinations were carried out in four study visits: before fasting (V0), in the third week of fasting (V1) as well as 3 weeks (V3) and 3 months (V4) after fasting. Data collection included blood and urine samples, anthropometric measurements and bioelectrical impedance analysis. At V0 and V1, 24- and 12-hour urine and serum osmolality were measured. At V0–V2, alterations in the circadian clock phase were monitored in 16 participants. Our study was augmented by an additional survey with 144 healthy Bahá'í volunteers filling out questionnaires and with subgroups attending metabolic measurements (n = 11) and qualitative interviews (n = 13), the results of which will be published separately.Results: Exploratory data analysis revealed that serum osmolality (n = 34, p < 0.001) and 24-hour urine osmolality (n = 34, p = 0.003) decreased during daytime fasting but remained largely within the physiological range and returned to pre-fasting levels during night hours. BMI (body mass index), total body fat mass, and resting metabolic rate decreased during fasting (n = 34, p < 0.001), while body cell mass and body water appeared unchanged. The circadian phase estimated by transcript biomarkers of blood monocytes advanced by 1.1 h (n = 16, p < 0.005) during fasting and returned to pre-fasting values 3 weeks after fasting. Most observed changes were not detectable anymore 3 months after fasting.Conclusions: Results indicate that BF (Bahá'í fasting) is safe, has no negative effects on hydration, can improve fat metabolism and can cause transient phase shifts of circadian rhythms.Trial Registration:https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/, identifier: NCT03443739.

Bullying is a worldwide problem that has serious effects on the mental health of both victims and perpetrators. Although bullying seems related to increasing globalization and migration, it has seldom been researched in this context. This exploratory study examined bullying experiences and related depressive symptoms among a sample of adolescents with a Turkish migration background in a German school context (N = 103, 56.7% female, MAge = 16.17, SDAge = 1.36). The study focuses on three migration-related variables as potentially salutogenic factors: Ethnic class composition, acculturation, and religiosity. While the ethnic class composition did not show any effect, an integration acculturation strategy and religiosity proved to be protective factors against bullying experience. The negative prediction of integration on depressive symptoms was not consistent throughout the multivariate analyses. The results are discussed against the background of new impulses for bullying intervention programs for this vulnerable group of adolescents from a Turkish migration background.

Music and religion are linked in many ways. For example, music can trigger religious experiences, which has been a topic since the beginnings of the study of the psychology of religion. Whether this musical effect is culture-dependent, a pure neuropsychological phenomenon, or a combination of both remains empirically unanswered. This cross-cultural experiment among n = 84 Turks and n = 63 Germans shows that religious music can trigger religious experience but this is, at least partially, a culture-dependent experience. Moreover, certain kinds of religious music can fail to trigger a religious experience independent of culture, which can also underpin a neuropsychological effect of musical features on religious experience. Religious experience during music is strongly predicted by positive emotions that are felt during the musical experience. Future studies should be more interdisciplinary, focusing on the effect of certain musical features on the religious experience of individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

This study examines the multidimensionality of spirituality by comparing the applicability of two models—the five-dimensional model of religiosity by Huber that we have extended with a sixth dimension of ethics and the three-dimensional spirituality model by Bucher. This qualitative study applied a semi-structured interview guideline of spirituality to a stratified sample of N = 48 secular individuals in Switzerland. To test these two models, frequency, valence, and contingency analysis of Mayring’s qualitative content analysis were used. It could be shown that Bucher’s three-dimensional model covers only about half of the spirituality codes in the interviews; it is especially applicable for implicit and salient spiritual aspects in general, as well as for spiritual experience in specific. In contrast, the extended six-dimensional model by Huber could be applied to almost all of the spirituality-relevant codes. Therefore, in principle, the scope of this six-dimensional model can be expanded to spirituality. The results are discussed in the context of future development of a multidimensional spirituality scale that is based on Huber’s Centrality of Religiosity by extending the religiosity concept to spirituality without mutually excluding these concepts from each other.

The positive relationship between body image and religiosity, as found in Christian samples, is often explained in terms of a moderate dress style of highly religious women. Unfortunately, almost nothing is known about the relationship between body image, religiosity, and dress style among female Muslims who live in Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, we conducted an exploratory questionnaire study among 59 female Muslims between 17 and 46 years (n = 29 veiled, n = 30 non-veiled) in Turkey, measuring social appearance anxiety and religiosity (intrinsic, extrinsic, normative, popular religiosity). The results show that veiled women score much lower on social appearance anxiety than non-veiled women. All four forms of religiosity are highly negatively correlated with social appearance anxiety for the whole sample and the veiled subsample. The results are discussed in the context of wearing the hijab and normative religiosity as important buffering factors against a negative body image among Turkish-Muslim women.