Groups and Emotional Arousal Mediate Neural Synchrony and Perceived Ritual Efficacy.

Philip S Cho,Nicolas Escoffier,Yinan Mao,April Ching,Christopher Green,Harvey Whitehouse,Jonathan Jong

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02071

Abstract

We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. Using a novel protocol, EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The results revealed distinct neural signatures and behavioral patterns between the experimental conditions. Arousal levels predicted ratings of ritual efficacy. Increased efficacy was marked by suppressed alpha and beta power, regardless of group or individual setting. In groups, efficacy ratings converged. Individual setting showed increased within-participant phase synchronization in alpha and beta bands, while group setting enhanced between-participant theta phase synchronization. This reflected group participants' orientation toward a common perspective and social coordination. These findings suggest that co-presence in groups leads to a social-tuning effect supported by between-participant theta phase synchrony. Together these neural synchrony patterns reveal how collective rituals have both individual and communal dimensions. The emotionality of spirit-medium rituals drives individual perceptions of efficacy, while co-presence in groups signals the significance of an event and socially tunes enhanced agreement in perceptual ratings. In other words, mass gatherings may foster social cohesion without necessarily requiring group-size scaling limitations of direct face-to-face interaction. This could have implications for the scaling computability of synchrony in large groups as well as for humanistic studies in areas such as symbolic interactionism.

Highlights

A central question in the history of the human sciences has been how social groups and emotions shape perceptions of shared culture, such as religious rituals
The ratings of efficacy were highly correlated with the other measures of ritual perception we recorded during the experiment
We investigated whether Arousal predicted enhanced perceived Efficacy, and whether this effect interacted with Social setting (Figure 2)

Summary

Introduction

A central question in the history of the human sciences has been how social groups and emotions shape perceptions of shared culture, such as religious rituals. Anthropologists and sociologists have long argued that the communality and emotionality of a rituals bind social groups in the collective belief in a performance’s meaningfulness and efficacy (Durkheim, 1995; Collins, 2004; Whitehouse, 2004; Scheve and Salmela, 2014; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2015). Social scientists have long debated over the role of emotions in the perception of ritual efficacy. In his pioneering fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands, Bronislaw Malinowski argued that ritual efficacy derived from a desire to control situations where outcomes are uncertain, as a means of reducing anxiety (Malinowski, 1935, 1945; Felson and Gmelch, 1979). Building on the insights of LeviStrauss, medical sociologists and psychiatrists have argued that emotions evoked by rituals, within the multifaceted symbolism of myths, elicit a sense of meaningfulness for participants (Dow, 1986; Kirmayer, 2004; Lee, 2010)

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Discussion

Conclusion