In their chapter, Martin Lang and Radim Chvaja examine the evolutionary relationship between anxiety and rituals and ask whether the ritual reduction of anxiety might be adaptive?
They argue that in pro-longed uncontrollable circumstances, long-lasting anxiety could be unnecessarily harmful. Ritual anxiety reduction could thus be beneficial in safe environments, even if not mitigating the threat itself.
You can find the chapter here:
Jana Nenadalová, Piotr Szymanek (Jagiellonian University), and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State University) received a grant from the Open Science of Religion initiative (supported by the John Templeton Foundation) for a virtual reality study.
In his thesis, titled Costly signaling theory of pilgrimage: The case study of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he studied whether pilgrimages may function as costly signals of commitment to group norms.
