Center for Psychology of Religion

Vassilis Saroglou is full professor of psychology at the UCL-University of Louvain, with expertise in psychology of religion, personality, social, and cross-cultural psychology, moral psychology, and psychology of positive emotions.
 

Born in Athens, he studied religion, philosophy, and psychology and completed his PhD in psychology (UCLouvain, 1999). Professor at UCLouvain since 2001, he has also been Fulbright postdoc researcher at W&M-William & Mary, Virginia (2000), visiting scholar at ASU-Arizona State University (2009) and NYU-New York University (2017), and visiting lecturer at several European and other Universities.

 

He has developed long-term empirical research on theoretically and socially critical issues regarding religion, spirituality, fundamentalism, and atheism, in interaction with

• social behavior: prosociality, submission, prejudice (ethnoreligious, ideological, sexism, homophobia)

• personality, emotions, cognition: personality traits, birth order effects; awe, humor, nostalgia; need for closure, existential quest, universal vs. uncommon beliefs

• morality: values, sexuality, deontology vs. consequentialism

• culture: identities, acculturation, and cultural differences btw. monotheisms and East-West

 

This research, having benefited from national, European, and US grants (2.9mm) and the supervision of 20 PhD students and postdocs, has resulted into 150 scientific publications. Vassilis Saroglou has

• authored The Psychology of Religion (Routledge, 2021),

• edited Religion, Personality, and Social Behavior (Psychology Press, 2014), and

• co-edited “Religion and Culture” (Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2011), “Religion” (Current Opinion in Psychology, 2021), and "The Psychology of Agnosticism" (Int J Psy Religion, in prep.).

The research has been commented in media and press of more than 20 countries, including Scientific American Mind, Huffington Post, The Independent, and Politico.

 

Listed among the world’s top (0.5-1%) cited scholars (rankings contr. for multi-authorship: Stanford/Elsevier 2023; ScholarGPS 2022), Vassilis Saroglou has received scientific distinctions from APA-Div 36 (Early Career Award, Mentoring Award, Fellow, William James Award), APS (Fellow), SPSP (Fellow), EAPP (Mid-Career Award), IAPR (Godin Prize), and AISR (Fellow). He has served as IAPR President and IJPR assoc. and co-Editor. In 2020, he received the Quinquennial Solvay Excellence Prize (FNRS) in human and social sciences.