Smith and colleagues compiled 147 different studies that had each already assessed the correlation between religiosity and depression, altogether involving almost 99,000 different subjects.13 They found that when looking at all of these studies together, the correlation between religiosity and depression was -0.096. In the simplest of layman’s terms, this means that religious people are less depressed than nonreligious people, on average. However, of all the variation we might see in a population’s scores on a depression test, religiosity only accounts for about 1% of it. Yes, that means that
...more
