Abstract
Parental religious beliefs and practices (religiosity) may have profound effects on youth, especially in neurodevelopmentally complex periods such as adolescence. In n = 5566 children (median age = 120.0 months; 52.1% females; 71.2% with religious affiliation) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, relationships between parental religiosity and non-religious beliefs on family values (data on youth beliefs were not available), topological properties of youth resting-state brain networks, and executive function, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility were investigated. Lower caregiver education and family income were associated with stronger parental beliefs (p < 0.01). Strength of both belief types was correlated with lower efficiency, community structure, and robustness of frontoparietal control, temporoparietal, and dorsal attention networks (p < 0.05), and lower Matrix Reasoning scores. Stronger religious beliefs were negatively associated (directly and indirectly) with multiscale properties of salience and default-mode networks, and lower Flanker and Dimensional Card Sort scores, but positively associated with properties of the precuneus. Overall, these effects were small (Cohen's d ~ 0.2 to ~ 0.4). Overlapping neuromodulatory and cognitive effects of parental beliefs suggest that early adolescents may perceive religious beliefs partly as context-independent rules on expected behavior. However, religious beliefs may also differentially affect cognitive flexibility, attention, and inhibitory control and their neural substrates.