Templeton Foundation. Gods in Mind: The Science of Religious Cognition

The Templeton Foundation has launched a new funding competition. 

Copied from their website, which is linked below:
Definitions
Religious cognition is defined for the purposes of this competition as the cognitive processes and representational states involved in knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and experience relating to gods and other supernatural agents. As with other types of social cognition, cognitive representations of gods contain multiple types of content. For example, a person’s representation of God could include such information as (a) beliefs about God’s existence or non-existence, (b) beliefs about non-anthropomorphic attributes (e.g., omnipresence, invisibility, immortality), (c) attributions of psychological characteristics (e.g., compassion, fairness, distance, harshness), (d) attributions of feelings and emotions (e.g., God’s emotions toward me; my emotions toward God), (e) relational schemas (e.g., attachment to God), (f) attributional frameworks for understanding God’s causal involvement and motives in relation to different events (e.g., whether a prayer was answered, why a good or bad event occurred), (g) relational scripts (e.g., patterns of interpersonal interaction with supernatural agents), and (h) contrasts between doctrinal (propositional) and experiential (affect-laden) representations regarding all of the preceding. Ordinary social cognitive processes are also relevant to the way in which people think about supernatural agents. Just as one example, the salience of any given content probably varies according to mood, motivation, and context.

Scope
The present funding competition targets 10 specific strands of research on the representation of supernatural agents. These can be grouped into three general approaches: universal constraints and features of religious cognition (1, 2), individual differences in the content and processing of religious cognition (3 – 8), and broader conceptual and methodological issues (9, 10). A priority for this competition is to integrate theory and findings across these strands. Typical research questions within each of these strands are as follows:

1. Developmental psychology: How do mental representations of gods typically develop and change over the life cycle? What cognitive features (e.g., theory of mind) constrain such representations? 
2. Cognitive science of religion: How do people represent the non-anthropomorphic attributes of supernatural agents? Why do people believe or not believe in agents with such properties? 
3. Sociology and cultural anthropology: How do culturally dominant ideas about gods influence supernatural agent representations at the individual level? How does language influence representations of gods?
4. Personality and social psychology: How do individuals represent the character or personality of God? In what way are representations of gods cognitively similar or different to representations of people?
5. Clinical psychology: What cognitive processes are involved when people use God as a positive or negative coping resource? Why do people get angry at God and how can it be resolved? 
6. Psychodynamic psychology/object relations: What influence do children’s understandings of their parents have upon their representations of God?
7. Attachment: How and why can God function as an attachment figure? Under what circumstances does attachment to God correspond with or compensate for early attachment figures?
8. Attribution: How and when do people account for events in terms of the actions of a supernatural agent? What attributional processes are involved in everyday experience of God? When is prayer perceived as having been answered?
9. Multilevel models of cognition and emotion: How do distinctions between (a) propositional, “head-level”, explicit, or rational cognition and (b) implicational, “heart-level”, implicit, or experiential cognition apply to religious cognition? Which multilevel models of cognition and emotion are the most useful for the study of religious cognition?
10. Measurement: How can the cognitive processes and representational states involved in religious cognition best be measured?

More here:
http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/funding-competitions/gods-in-minds-the-science-of-religious-cognition