Alexa M. Tullett

Reflecting on God: Religious Primes Can Reduce Neurophysiological Response to Errors

The world is a vast and complex place that can sometimes generate feelings of uncertainty and distress for its inhabitants. Although religion is associated with a sense of meaning and order, it remains unclear whether religious belief can actually cause people to feel less anxiety and distress. To test the anxiolytic power of religion, we conducted two experiments focusing on the error-related negativity (ERN)—a neural signal that arises from the anterior cingulate cortex and is associated with defensive responses to errors. The results indicate that for believers, conscious and nonconscious religious primes cause a decrease in ERN amplitude. In contrast, priming nonbelievers with religious concepts causes an increase in ERN amplitude. Overall, examining basic neurophysiological processes reveals the power of religion to act as a buffer against anxious reactions to self-generated, generic errors—but only for individuals who believe.

Right frontal cortical asymmetry predicts empathic reactions: support for a link between withdrawal motivation and empathy.

Depression, diminished positive affect, and exaggerated negative affect have all been linked to right frontal cortical asymmetry as measured by electroencephalography (EEG). Emerging evidence, however, suggests that right frontal EEG asymmetry might be linked to empathic responding. EEG was used to assess baseline asymmetries in frontal brain activity. Participants viewed images associated with a charity and then rated their sadness, personal distress, perspective-taking, and empathic concern towards the images. We found that baseline measures of right frontal asymmetry were a significant predictor of empathic concern, a relationship that was mediated by feelings of sadness. These results provide a more complex view of right frontal asymmetry and suggest that this pattern of brain activity might facilitate sensitivity towards the suffering of others.

The need to believe: a neuroscience account of religion as a motivated process

Religious belief has been shown to offer substantial benefits to its adherents, including improved well-being and health. We suggest that these benefits might be explained, at least in part, from a “motivated meaning-making” perspective. This model holds that people are motivated to create and sustain meaning (i.e., a sense of coherency between beliefs, goals, and perceptions of the environment, which provides individuals with the feeling that the world is an orderly place), and that religious beliefs buffer the distress associated with disruptions to meaning, thus leading to decreases in distress. We further propose that religions palliative attributes can be measured at the level of the brain, specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which produces a “distress signal” upon the detection of errors, conflict, and expectancy violation. Using a social neuroscience paradigm, we investigate four main predictions that arise from this model: (1) religion should be associated with activation in the ACC; (2) religion should decrease activation in the ACC; (3) this attenuation of ACC activity should be related to religions ability to buffer bodily states of distress, and not to decreases in motivation, attention, or control; (4) religion should have these effects because it provides meaning and thus buffers people from uncertainty. All predictions were supported, thus providing evidence, at the neural level, for the motivated meaning-making models account of the salutary properties of religion.

Is Dissonance Reduction a Special Case of Fluid Compensation? Evidence That Dissonant Cognitions Cause Compensatory Affirmation and Abstraction

Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonance, and vice versa. One specific prediction from the meaning maintenance model would be that cognitive dissonance, like other expectancy violations, should lead to the affirmation of unrelated beliefs, or the abstraction of unrelated schemas when the dissonant event cannot be easily accommodated. This article presents 4 studies (N = 1124) demonstrating that the classic induced-compliance dissonance paradigm can lead not only to a change of attitudes (dissonance reduction), but also to (a) an increased reported belief in God (Study 2), (b) a desire to punish norm-violators (Study 1 and 3), (c) a motivation to detect patterns amid noise (Study 3), and (d) polarizing support of public policies among those already biased toward a particular side (Study 4). These results are congruent with theories that propose content-general fluid compensation following the experience of anomaly, a finding not predicted by dissonance theory. The results suggest that dissonance reduction behaviors may share psychological processes described by other theories addressing violations of expectations.

Confronting Threats to Meaning: A New Framework for Understanding Responses to Unsettling Events

We all have models of the world, and when these models fit with what goes on around us we have a sense of meaning. Unfortunately, we are often faced with situations that violate, or threaten, our models, and when this happens we attempt to resolve these inconsistencies to restore a sense of meaning. It is well documented that we often try to reduce threats in indirect ways—ways that, at first glance, seem to reduce the negative feelings without actually solving the problem. This article explores the possibility that threats can be interpreted in different ways depending on the person and context, and suggests that because of this, different threat reduction approaches can be adaptive in different situations. Specifically, it presents the hypothesis that concrete construal of threats should result in compensation efforts that are relatively direct, whereas abstract construals should expand the possibilities for compensation to include indirect strategies. It describes the existing evidence, where evidence is lacking, and potentially fruitful avenues of future exploration.

Randomness Increases Self-Reported Anxiety and Neurophysiological Correlates of Performance Monitoring

Several prominent theories spanning clinical, social and developmental psychology suggest that people are motivated to see the world as a sensible orderly place. These theories presuppose that randomness is aversive because it is associated with unpredictability. If this is the case, thinking that the world is random should lead to increased anxiety and heightened monitoring of ones actions and their consequences. Here, we conduct experimental tests of both of these ideas. Participants read one of three passages: (i) comprehensible order, (ii) incomprehensible order and (iii) randomness. In Study 1, we examined the effects of these passages on self-reported anxiety. In Study 2, we examined the effects of the same manipulation on the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential associated with performance monitoring. We found that messages about randomness increased self-reported anxiety and ERN amplitude relative to comprehensible order, whereas incomprehensible order had intermediate effects. These results lend support to the theoretically important idea that randomness is unsettling because it implies that the world is unpredictable.

Errors in Moral Forecasting Perceptions of Affect Shape the Gap Between Moral Behaviors and Moral Forecasts

Research in moral decision making has shown that there may not be a one-to-one relationship between peoples’ moral forecasts and behaviors. Although past work suggests that physiological arousal may account for part of the behavior-forecasting discrepancy, whether or not perceptions of affect play an important determinant remains unclear. Here, we investigate whether this discrepancy may arise because people fail to anticipate how they will feel in morally significant situations. In Study 1, forecasters predicted cheating significantly more on a test than participants in a behavior condition actually cheated. Importantly, forecasters who received false somatic feedback, indicative of high arousal, produced forecasts that aligned more closely with behaviors. In Study 2, forecasters who misattributed their arousal to an extraneous source forecasted cheating significantly more. In Study 3, higher dispositional emotional awareness was related to less forecasted cheating. These findings suggest that perceptions of affect play a key role in the behavior-forecasting dissociation.

Existential neuroscience: a proximate explanation of religion as flexible meaning and palliative

The cognitive science of religion has made great strides in the past decade (e.g., Boyer, 2008), with more and better research from many disciplines asking basic questions about why religions exist, persist, thrive, and heal. The journal that is publishing these very words, Religion, Brain & Behavior, is testament to the accelerating nature of this interdisciplinary movement, as is the breadth and quality of the commentaries that our target article generated. We are grateful that these commentaries have forced us not only to think deeply about the ideas contained therein, but also to elaborate upon our own model. Rather than addressing each reply in turn, we built our response around the major themes that emerged. Overall, there was consensus satisfaction with our basic neuroscience findings linking religious belief with brain-based error-related distress. There was less satisfaction, however, with the way we broadly interpreted these data. Paying heed to the most frequent questions and ideas put forth by the commentators, we organized our response as follows: we (1) discuss our use of the term ‘‘meaning,’’ (2) contrast the kind of proximate explanations provided by the motivated meaning model with ultimate explanations provided by evolutionary models, (3) provide evidence for why flexible meaning systems like religion may be better palliatives than scrutable meaning systems like science, and (4) suggest that an affective interpretation of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity accounts for more data than a purely cognitive explanation, but also note that both explanations might be functionally isomorphic. We end by mapping out the kinds of future studies that we are now planning and that were inspired by the valuable commentaries.

Fueling doubt and openness: Experiencing the unconscious, constructed nature of perception induces uncertainty and openness to change

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). The article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief, Steven Sloman, following a request by the authors. The reason for the retraction is that the article includes fabricated or manipulated data.

Testing the Link Between Empathy and Lay Theories of Happiness

Happiness is a topic that ignites both considerable interest and considerable disagreement. Thus far, however, there has been little attempt to characterize people’s lay theories about happiness or explore their consequences. We examined whether individual differences in lay theories of happiness would predict empathy. In Studies 1a and 1b, we validated the Lay Theories of Happiness Scale (LTHS), which includes three dimensions: flexibility, controllability, and locus. In Study 2, higher dispositional empathy was predicted by the belief that happiness is flexible, controllable, and internal. In Studies 3 and 4, higher empathy toward a specific target was predicted by the belief that happiness is flexible, uncontrollable, and external. In conjunction, Studies 2, 3, and 4 provide evidence that trait and state empathy are separable and can have opposing relationships with people’s lay theories. Overall, these findings highlight generalized beliefs that may guide empathic reactions to the unhappiness of others.