Dr. Eve Binks

Eve is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University where she also contributes to the programme delivered by the Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies. Eve received her PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2007, and her PhD research focused on the ‘Psychosocial Dimensions of the Irish and Northern Irish Diaspora’. She has presented papers at various national and international conferences on diasporic social identities, dissociative experiences, religious attitudes and orientations, and the psychological impact of exposure to political violence, and has published research in the areas of social identity, religious orientations, ethnic memories, exposure to political violence, and children’s understandings of the concepts of war and peace. She has also published invited contributions to books on ‘Responding to Traumatised Children’ and ‘Conflict and the Reconstruction of Civil Society’, and has co-authored a number of cross-national research articles with international research teams. Eve’s most recent research will focus on the readiness for reconciliation in Israel and Northern Ireland.

The Function of Religious Beliefs and Practices: Buffering the Impact of Exposure to Traumatic Events.
Dr. Eve Binks, Psychology Department, Liverpool Hope University

Although the area of religion has been present in psychology since before the early work of Freud (1927), it is only since the mid 1950’s that there has been an empirical approach to the psychology of religion (Hood, Spilka, Hunsberger & Gorsuch, 1996).

In terms of the function of religious beliefs, it has been suggested that there appears to be a connective function played by religiosity in terms of protection and or the reduction of psychological disorders (Francis Robbins, Lewis, Quigley and Wheeler, 2004), while Hans Mol (1976) suggests that the key function of religion is to stabilise both individual and group identity. Further research has implied that religion may be an effective defence mechanism for dealing with the fear of loss of control and death experienced during times of exposure to trauma. After allowing for lifestyle variables, many researchers (e.g. Koenig et al., 1999; Oman & Reed, 1998) have indicated that there is a positive relationship between physical health and religion for both males and females, while Koenig, McCullough and Larson (2001) have identified 100 studies, which presented statistical data on the relationship between psychological well-being and religious involvement. Pargament (1997) reasons that religion and religious involvement may protect psychological and physiological health against the impact of stress, indicating that religion may cause a modification of the processes involved in stress appraisal. Thus Pargament suggests that religiosity may be interpreted as a coping process. The current study aimed to assess the role of religion as a mechanism for coping with traumatic events, with a specific focus on political violence in Northern Ireland. While Northern Ireland might be divided at an individual level by what is termed cultural religion, it is also fair to observe that it is divided at a societal level by civil religions. A nation should have one dominant civil religion but Northern Ireland has two and as a consequence is engaged in a disagreement of “competing principles” (Demerath, 2000, p.132). Each community in Northern Ireland has their own versions of the past, and of the future, has their own sacred events and religious symbols, and rather than having the usual effect of uniting a nation, the competing civil religions in Northern Ireland have been a source of constant division with the result that religion in Northern Ireland has become more important on a societal level than on a theological one (Demerath, 2000). The current study aimed to assess the function of religious beliefs in societies in conflict, focussing on religious beliefs and practices, exposure to traumatic events in the form of political violence, and psychological wellbeing.