Martin Lang

#NewPaperAlertšŸšØ

Following our previous approach establishing that #anxiety increases behavioral ritualization, we now show that #ritualization may help decrease anxiety, albeit only for participants more susceptible to anxiety induction.

#ritual #BayesianBrain #PredictiveProcessing

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-23885-4

Effects of predictable behavioral patterns on anxiety dynamics - Scientific Reports

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 (nā€‰=ā€‰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.

Nature
Nov 11, 2022 at 1:53pmWeb
Show threadDr Mark ButlerNov 12, 2022
@martinlangcz I don't know what these diagrams mean but I'm interested to find out!
Show threadMartin LangNov 12, 2022
@mental Those diagrams are stimuli guiding participants' hand movements. We opted to guide participants' movements rather than having them learn the movements, which would be impractical in the control/unpredictable condition and would introduce a host of other confounds
Show threadNadiah KristensenNov 12, 2022
@martinlangcz So if I understand correctly, we might expect ritual to calm people because people believe the ritual does something. However, you've shown that ritual calms anxiety (in already anxious people) intrinsically, because it involves repetition. Did I understand the main point correctly?
Show threadNadiah KristensenNov 12, 2022

@martinlangcz

Is it likely that the calming effects of repetition are just a spandrel or a lucky accident, and perhaps various religions stumbled upon this fact and harnessed it as part of their practice? Or is there something about repetition that it "makes sense" to find it calming? (Perhaps because of the opposite, that if a situation is hard to predict, you should become more alert?)

PS: I had to chuckle sadly at the use of Esperanto as an unlikely-to-be-known language

Show threadMartin LangNov 14, 2022
@nadiah Yes, beliefs about ritual efficacy should decrease anxiety but do not explain why rituals look the way they do (repetitive and rigid behavioral sequences). Rituals in anxiogenic contexts are similar to manipulative actions where repetitiveness is associated with efficacy and rigidity with (social) conservation of eficacious procedures...
Show threadMartin LangNov 14, 2022
@nadiah Since rituals often occur in uncertain contexts, the repetitiveness and rigidity help increase the predicitve success of internal models (even if the environment remains unpredictable) and, thus, calm people (as you suggested). Whether this response would be adaptive depends on the probability and magnitude of actual threat. Makes sense?
Show threadNadiah KristensenNov 14, 2022

@martinlangcz Yes, that does make sense, thank you.

I thought it was a really clever question to ask, if rigidity itself has an effect. Perhaps because it's something I took for granted --- rituals are rigid because that's basically what a ritual is --- it wouldn't have occurred to me to ask if that in itself was important. Very interesting paper!