Claire White
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586443 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Claire White |
| GIVEN NAMES | Claire |
| FAMILY NAME | White |
| SIGNATURE | WHITE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | California State University, Northridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6837-0671 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1965 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Presence Experiences After Loss
Presence experiences-the sense that a significant person who has died is nearby or perceptible-are common after bereavement but remain underexamined in grief research. This study investigated their prevalence, interpersonal predictors, and interpretation in a diverse urban sample of adults bereaved in the past 24 months ( N = 239), using structured interviews and thematic analysis of open-ended responses. Over two-thirds of participants reported …
Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand, ‘Lélia’, 1833, suivi de l’édition de 1839
Whence and Whither CSR
The cognitive science of religion
The People’s Politics
Jean Béraud’s À la Salle Graffard was widely considered to be a highlight of the 1884 Paris Salon, singled out by critics for its witty take on leftist demagoguery. Béraud’s spectacle of a rowdy assembly was praised for its true-to-life vision, skewering those types of contemporary socialism familiar to a bourgeois audience from the mainstream press. This essay investigates the kind of political tourism that Béraud’s scene performs, including as …
État présent
Past Life Meditation Decreases Existential Death Anxiety and Increases Meaning in Life among Individuals Who Believe in the Paranormal
Despite their growing popularity, little is known about the psychological effects of participating in past-life meditation groups in contemporary western contexts. We conducted a study to re-create some of the conditions observed in the field by facilitating a group of adults interested in exploring past life meditation. Before the session, participants completed a survey about their afterlife beliefs and associated experiences. Participants also…
Mortuary Practices
Rituals surrounding the treatment and disposal of fellow humans are recurrent features of human culture. Many practices are time-consuming, expensive, elaborate, and even dangerous. Why then do people perform mortuary rituals? Anthropological and sociological researchers have long asserted that mortuary rituals confer tangible benefits to the social group. Importantly, these benefits exceed their costs, which helps to explain why people engage in…
Five Issues in the Debate
In this response, I identify and address five recurring issues raised in the commentaries to my recently published book, An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion: Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture. These issues are: (1) Conceptualizing and studying religion, (2) the dialogue between method and theory, (3) the theological implications of the CSR, (4) history and culture, and finally, I end with (5) the future of relig…
The Dead May Kill You
There is considerable evidence that beliefs in supernatural punishment decrease self-interested behavior and increase cooperation amongst group members. To date, research has largely focused on beliefs concerning omniscient moralistic gods in large-scale societies. While there is an abundance of ethnographic accounts documenting fear of supernatural punishment, there is a dearth of systematic cross-cultural comparative quantitative evidence as to…
The Affair before the Affair
This article examines the legacy of the scandal wrought by Zola’s novel Lourdes (1894) for future controversy over the writer’s pivotal involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola’s fictional account of the Pyrenean shrine—its founding apparitions, and its miracle cures— provoked a deluge of refutations from Catholic clergymen, doctors and writers. The Lourdes scandal has been understood as a flashpoint for Catholic indignation in the ongoing ‘cultur…
How to Know You’ve Survived Death
Reports of people who have survived death have captured the attention of mainstream audiences. Why do these ideas enjoy persistent and widespread success in contemporary Western culture? Adopting a cognitive approach to the study of afterlife accounts and drawing upon our own research, we argue that mainstream survival narratives are popular because they provide convincing evidence that one has journeyed to another realm. Such accounts are convin…
The kiss of death
Not Just Dead Meat
Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment…
Who Wants to Live Forever
Around 30% of world cultures endorse reincarnation and 20% of contemporary Americans think that reincarnation is plausible. This paper addresses the question of why belief in reincarnation is so pervasive across geographically disparate contexts. While social scientists have provided compelling explanations of the particularistic aspects of reincarnation, less is known about the psychological foundations of such beliefs. In this paper, I review r…
The effects of corpse viewing and corpse condition on vigilance for deceased loved ones
Cross-cultural similarities in reasoning about personal continuity in reincarnation
Ethnographic reports suggest the cross-cultural recurrence of practices designed to determine who has returned to the human world through the process of reincarnation. This paper attempts to explain these trends by cross-culturally replicating experiments originally conducted in the US with participants from mixed-religious affiliations to Jains in South India. In a series of imaginative perspective-taking tasks, Jain adults reasoned about the li…
The Cognitive Foundations of Reincarnation
Anthropological records and psychological studies demonstrate the recurrence of ideas about how to determine the identity of reincarnated persons. These ideas are often incoherent with corresponding theological dogma about the process of reincarnation. Specifically, even though reincarnation is represented as a process of change, people often seek out and interpret particular similarities between the deceased and reincarnated agent as evidence th…
Establishing Personal Identity in Reincarnation
Little is known about how the minds and bodies of reincarnated agents are represented. In three studies, participants decided which individual, out of multiple contenders, was most likely to be the reincarnation of a deceased person, based upon a single matching feature between the deceased and each of the candidates. While most participants endorsed reincarnation as entailing a new body, they reasoned that candidates with a similar physical mark…
Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture
In this engaging new study, Claire White reveals how representations of work and leisure became the vehicle for anxieties and fantasies about class and alienation, affecting, in turn, the ways in whic
Psychological Essentialism in Selecting the 14th Dalai Lama
common-sense psychological essentialism as applied to objects could explain the selection process for the 14 th Dalai Lama in Tibet. Specifically, they argued that Tibetan bureaucrats represent the Dalai Lama’s personal objects as imbued with his essence. Because of this, they claimed, Tibetan bureaucrats test whether candidates are the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama based on whether the candidates can correctly identify, from a number of items,…
Problems for the cognitive-depletion model of religious interactions
Schoejdt, S??rensen, Nielbo, Xygalatas, Mitkidis and Bulbulia put forward a new cognitive model of religious interactions, which we depict in Figure one. The model stresses three common features of such interactions: the requirement to suppress emotion expression, the exposure to ritualized behavior and the presence of a charismatic authority (1). 1 These features have different cognitive effects involving different sorts of cognitive-resource de…
Generating Knowledge of Academic Language Among Urban Middle School Students
A quasi-experimental study of a novel, cross-content area vocabulary intervention program called Word Generation showed significantly greater growth among 6th- to 8th-grade students in schools implementing the program than in comparison schools, on a curriculum-specific test. Furthermore, the language-minority students in the treatment, but not the comparison, schools showed greater growth than the English-only students. Improvement on the curric…
Genealogical study of human twinning
Genealogical study of human twinning. G Wyshak, and C WhiteCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.55.10.1586 Published Online: August 29, 2011
Not Just Dead Meat
Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment…
The Cognitive Foundations of Reincarnation
Anthropological records and psychological studies demonstrate the recurrence of ideas about how to determine the identity of reincarnated persons. These ideas are often incoherent with corresponding theological dogma about the process of reincarnation. Specifically, even though reincarnation is represented as a process of change, people often seek out and interpret particular similarities between the deceased and reincarnated agent as evidence th…
Genealogical study of human twinning
Genealogical study of human twinning. G Wyshak, and C WhiteCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.55.10.1586 Published Online: August 29, 2011
Generating Knowledge of Academic Language Among Urban Middle School Students
A quasi-experimental study of a novel, cross-content area vocabulary intervention program called Word Generation showed significantly greater growth among 6th- to 8th-grade students in schools implementing the program than in comparison schools, on a curriculum-specific test. Furthermore, the language-minority students in the treatment, but not the comparison, schools showed greater growth than the English-only students. Improvement on the curric…
Problems for the cognitive-depletion model of religious interactions
Schoejdt, S??rensen, Nielbo, Xygalatas, Mitkidis and Bulbulia put forward a new cognitive model of religious interactions, which we depict in Figure one. The model stresses three common features of such interactions: the requirement to suppress emotion expression, the exposure to ritualized behavior and the presence of a charismatic authority (1). 1 These features have different cognitive effects involving different sorts of cognitive-resource de…
Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture
In this engaging new study, Claire White reveals how representations of work and leisure became the vehicle for anxieties and fantasies about class and alienation, affecting, in turn, the ways in whic
Psychological Essentialism in Selecting the 14th Dalai Lama
common-sense psychological essentialism as applied to objects could explain the selection process for the 14 th Dalai Lama in Tibet. Specifically, they argued that Tibetan bureaucrats represent the Dalai Lama’s personal objects as imbued with his essence. Because of this, they claimed, Tibetan bureaucrats test whether candidates are the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama based on whether the candidates can correctly identify, from a number of items,…
Establishing Personal Identity in Reincarnation
Little is known about how the minds and bodies of reincarnated agents are represented. In three studies, participants decided which individual, out of multiple contenders, was most likely to be the reincarnation of a deceased person, based upon a single matching feature between the deceased and each of the candidates. While most participants endorsed reincarnation as entailing a new body, they reasoned that candidates with a similar physical mark…
The effects of corpse viewing and corpse condition on vigilance for deceased loved ones
Cross-cultural similarities in reasoning about personal continuity in reincarnation
Ethnographic reports suggest the cross-cultural recurrence of practices designed to determine who has returned to the human world through the process of reincarnation. This paper attempts to explain these trends by cross-culturally replicating experiments originally conducted in the US with participants from mixed-religious affiliations to Jains in South India. In a series of imaginative perspective-taking tasks, Jain adults reasoned about the li…
The Cognitive Foundations of Reincarnation
Anthropological records and psychological studies demonstrate the recurrence of ideas about how to determine the identity of reincarnated persons. These ideas are often incoherent with corresponding theological dogma about the process of reincarnation. Specifically, even though reincarnation is represented as a process of change, people often seek out and interpret particular similarities between the deceased and reincarnated agent as evidence th…
The kiss of death
Not Just Dead Meat
Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment…
Who Wants to Live Forever
Around 30% of world cultures endorse reincarnation and 20% of contemporary Americans think that reincarnation is plausible. This paper addresses the question of why belief in reincarnation is so pervasive across geographically disparate contexts. While social scientists have provided compelling explanations of the particularistic aspects of reincarnation, less is known about the psychological foundations of such beliefs. In this paper, I review r…
How to Know You’ve Survived Death
Reports of people who have survived death have captured the attention of mainstream audiences. Why do these ideas enjoy persistent and widespread success in contemporary Western culture? Adopting a cognitive approach to the study of afterlife accounts and drawing upon our own research, we argue that mainstream survival narratives are popular because they provide convincing evidence that one has journeyed to another realm. Such accounts are convin…
The Affair before the Affair
This article examines the legacy of the scandal wrought by Zola’s novel Lourdes (1894) for future controversy over the writer’s pivotal involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola’s fictional account of the Pyrenean shrine—its founding apparitions, and its miracle cures— provoked a deluge of refutations from Catholic clergymen, doctors and writers. The Lourdes scandal has been understood as a flashpoint for Catholic indignation in the ongoing ‘cultur…
Mortuary Practices
Rituals surrounding the treatment and disposal of fellow humans are recurrent features of human culture. Many practices are time-consuming, expensive, elaborate, and even dangerous. Why then do people perform mortuary rituals? Anthropological and sociological researchers have long asserted that mortuary rituals confer tangible benefits to the social group. Importantly, these benefits exceed their costs, which helps to explain why people engage in…
Five Issues in the Debate
In this response, I identify and address five recurring issues raised in the commentaries to my recently published book, An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion: Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture. These issues are: (1) Conceptualizing and studying religion, (2) the dialogue between method and theory, (3) the theological implications of the CSR, (4) history and culture, and finally, I end with (5) the future of relig…
The Dead May Kill You
There is considerable evidence that beliefs in supernatural punishment decrease self-interested behavior and increase cooperation amongst group members. To date, research has largely focused on beliefs concerning omniscient moralistic gods in large-scale societies. While there is an abundance of ethnographic accounts documenting fear of supernatural punishment, there is a dearth of systematic cross-cultural comparative quantitative evidence as to…
Past Life Meditation Decreases Existential Death Anxiety and Increases Meaning in Life among Individuals Who Believe in the Paranormal
Despite their growing popularity, little is known about the psychological effects of participating in past-life meditation groups in contemporary western contexts. We conducted a study to re-create some of the conditions observed in the field by facilitating a group of adults interested in exploring past life meditation. Before the session, participants completed a survey about their afterlife beliefs and associated experiences. Participants also…
Whence and Whither CSR
The cognitive science of religion
The People’s Politics
Jean Béraud’s À la Salle Graffard was widely considered to be a highlight of the 1884 Paris Salon, singled out by critics for its witty take on leftist demagoguery. Béraud’s spectacle of a rowdy assembly was praised for its true-to-life vision, skewering those types of contemporary socialism familiar to a bourgeois audience from the mainstream press. This essay investigates the kind of political tourism that Béraud’s scene performs, including as …
État présent
Presence Experiences After Loss
Presence experiences-the sense that a significant person who has died is nearby or perceptible-are common after bereavement but remain underexamined in grief research. This study investigated their prevalence, interpersonal predictors, and interpretation in a diverse urban sample of adults bereaved in the past 24 months ( N = 239), using structured interviews and thematic analysis of open-ended responses. Over two-thirds of participants reported …
Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand, ‘Lélia’, 1833, suivi de l’édition de 1839
Psychology (17 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Cognition (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs (7 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (7 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)