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| August 5, 2010 | Thinking about God makes you less distressed | |
Washington:Upset about making an error? Well, thinking about God might just help you, suggests a new study. Researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind
of distress-response while participants made mistakes on a test. Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes
than those who hadn't. "Eighty-five percent of the world has some sort of religious
beliefs," said Michael Inzlicht, who co-wrote the study with Alexa Tullett, both
at the University of Toronto Scarborough. "I think it behooves us as psychologists to study why people have these beliefs; exploring what functions, if any, they
may serve," h added. With two experiments, the researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently-in a way that lets
them take setbacks in stride and react with less distress to anxiety-provoking mistakes. Participants either wrote about religion or did a scrambled word task
that included religion and God-related words. Then the researchers recorded their brain activity as they completed a computerized task-one that was chosen because
it has a high rate of errors. The results showed that when people were primed
to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity
decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area
associated with a number of things, including regulating bodily states of arousal
and serving an alerting function when things are going wrong, including when we
make mistakes. Interestingly, atheists reacted differently; when they were unconsciously
primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers
suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering
the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings
of distress. In contrast, for atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning
systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress. The study has been published
in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. |
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