Anxiety and ritualization: how rituals may help alleviate anxiety
Rituals can be found in every human society across the world and throughout history. Their occurrence ranges from the earliest burial rites, through complex ceremonies of contemporary religious systems, to sports, pathological gambling, and psychiatric disorders. One possible reason for this ubiquity is the role of ritual in reducing anxiety triggered by potential threats that lie beyond human control. Although this hypothesis is more than a hundred years old, there is only scant experimental research that would test this hypothesis or the cognitive mechanisms supporting the purported function. In our previous research, we showed that inducing anxiety leads to spontaneous ritualized behavior and proposed that, due to their predictability, rituals help reduce the perceived entropy of the surrounding environment. However, we still do not know whether rituals can truly help reduce anxiety. Within this project, we will conduct a series of studies aimed at examining different aspects of ritualization and its effects on reducing anxiety at both the psychological and physiological levels.
Anxiety and ritualization was 18-month long project (2018-2019) funded by the Neuron Foundation.
The Team
Research Outpus
The role of ritual behaviour in anxiety reduction: An investigation of Marathi religious practices in Mauritius
While the occurrence of rituals in anxiogenic contexts has been long noted and supported by ethnographic, quantitative and experimental studies, the purported effects of ritual behaviour on anxiety reduction have rarely been examined. In the present study, we investigate the anxiolytic effects of religious practices among the Marathi Hindu community in Mauritius and test whether these effects are facilitated by the degree of ritualization present in these practices. Seventy-five participants first experienced anxiety induction through the public speaking paradigm and were subsequently asked to either perform their habitual ritual in a local temple (ritual condition) or sit and relax (control condition). The results revealed that participants in the ritual condition reported lower perceived anxiety after the ritual treatment and displayed lower physiological anxiety, which was assessed as heart-rate variability. The degree of ritualization in the ritual condition showed suggestive albeit variable effects, and thus further investigation is needed. We conclude the paper with a discussion of various mechanisms that may facilitate the observed anxiolytic effects of ritual behaviour and should be investigated in the future.
Effects of predictable behavioral patterns on anxiety dynamics
People face stressors that are beyond their control and that maladaptively perpetuate anxiety. In these contexts, rituals emerge as a natural coping strategy helping decrease excessive anxiety. However, mechanisms facilitating these purported effects have rarely been studied. We hypothesized that repetitive and rigid ritual sequences help the human cognitive-behavioral system to return to low-entropy states and assuage anxiety. This study reports a pre-registered test of this hypothesis using a Czech student sample (n = 268). Participants were exposed to an anxiety induction and then randomly assigned to perform one of three actions: ritualized, control, and neutral (no-activity). We assessed the effects of this manipulation on cognitive and physiological anxiety, finding that ritualized action positively affected anxiety decrease, but this decrease was only slightly larger than in the other two conditions. Nevertheless, the between-condition differences in the reduction of physiological anxiety were well-estimated in participants more susceptible to anxiety induction.
Examining the possible adaptive value of ritualized behavior
The near-omnipresence of religious systems across the globe and throughout human history has led researchers to hypothesize that religious systems fulfill important adaptive functions in their specific niches (Lang & Kundt, 2020; Sosis, 2017, 2019). 1 Two functions have been of particular interest: promoting group coordination and cooperation and promoting positive effects on individual health and survival, while a third major function of religious systems, the promotion of reproduction, gradually gains attention (see Van Slyke, ch. 7 this volume; Shaver et al., 2020). Alongside beliefs in various superhuman agents and other components of religious systems, a major role in facilitating these functions appears to be played by ritual behavior, both in its individual and group forms (Purzycki & Arakchaa, 2013; Sosis, 2004; Xygalatas et al., 2019, 2013). In this chapter, we examine whether ritual behavior, in interaction …