Mood, expertise, and analogy:

implications for religious transmission

Introduction What role does mood play in religious organizations?

Religions differ in how much euphoria and dysphoria their members experience.

Yvan I. Russell1–3 *, Fernand Gobet2–3

& Harvey Whitehouse1.

1. 1. Explaining Religion Project, Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology University of Oxford

Oxford, UK

2.-3. Centre for the Study of Expertise Dept. of Psychology

Brunel University

Uxbridge, UK

2.

3.

Funded by a research

grant from the

European

Commission

Box 1: Five-disc Tower of Hanoi (TOH) gameThe optimal solution to the five-disc TOH game has 31 moves. The aim of the game is to move all of the discs from the leftmost peg to the rightmost peg. The two important rules are: (1) a larger disc cannot be placed upon a smaller disc, and (2) only one disc may be moved at a time.

Start

1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

7.

Very important step!!!

Congratulations!!!

• We approach this question by studying game playing.

• Specifically, we chose a well-studied game called the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) task, shown in Box 1.

• Games are not the same as rituals (e.g. no goal demotion), but like rituals they have strict rules to follow.

We will put participants in either a euphoric or dysphoric mood.

We predict that euphoric participants (who see the “big picture”) will be better at analogical reasoning.

If true, then we can say that euphoric participants are better at applying their religious lessons to everyday life.

We also predict the mood effects will only be effective if the participant has some prior knowledge (expertise).

High Arousal

Stress Excitement

Depression Relaxation

Unpleasant Feelings

Sleepiness

Pleasant Feelings

Figure 1: Screenshot of the “Bear God” task at the beginning of the game.

Rules: (1) the more serious ritual cannot be placed into a box where there is already a less serious ritual (equiv. to TOH rule 1), and (2) only one ritual can be moved at a time (equiv. to TOH rule 2).

Figure 3: The Affect Grid. Participants were asked to mark an “X” in the single square that

represents their current mood

Expert Euphoric Expert Dysphoric

Non-expert Euphoric Non-expert Dysphoric

TOH BGTOH BG

MC BGMC BG

Euphoria: positive emotion, elation, well-being (e.g. in Pentacostalism).

Dysphoria: negative emotion, anxiety, unpleasantness (e.g. “fire and brimstone”).

Mood is a “background emotional state that rises and dissipates slowly”

Research in psychology has shown that mood influences your style of cognitive processing

Euphoria promotes a more global, schematic style of information processing: i.e. you see the “big picture”

Dysphoria promotes a narrower, details-focused style of information processing.

Do religions differ in their success rate (e.g. perpetuation, recruitment) according to their relative amounts of euphoria and dysphoria?

Tower of Hanoi (TOH): see Box 1

Missionary Cannibal (MC) game: a simpler game where the aim is to move all characters to the other side of the river (see Fig. 2), but where cannibals can never outnumber the missionaries. The rules were non-equivalent to TOH.

Bear God (BG) game: this was a TOH-isomorph (i.e. where the rules were the same but the presentation was different), the aim of which was to move the five rituals into the leader shaman’s box. The two rules (see Fig. 1) were equivalent to TOH rules

Participants There were 67 participants recruited at Brunel University, London, UK

Mean age 23.6 years (SD = 3.9)

There were 30 males and 37 females

They were 43% Christian, 21% Muslim, 15% non-religious, 12% Hindu, 4.5% Sikh, and 4.5% Buddhist.

Apparatus There were 3 computer games

Figure 2: Missionary Cannibal Game

All games were played on a laptop computer

The Affect Grid (see Fig. 3) was used as a manipulation check

There were two 10 minute film clips that were shown in order to induce either a positive or negative mood

“The Trouble with Mr. Bean” (1991), an excerpt from the comedy series

“Threads” (1984), a very unpleasant film depicting a nuclear war with injury and death

Figure 4: The four conditions of the experiment

Procedure Participants were not told the true purpose of the study until the end

There were four conditions (see Fig. 4) and two independent variables (mood, expertise)

Participants filled out the Affect Grid (Fig. 3) four times during the procedure.

All participants watched a film clip

They were told to watch the video closely because it was a memory test (they could not be told that it was a mood induction)

If they were in the euphoric conditions, then they watched the comedy

If they were in the dysphoric conditions, then they watched the unpleasant film.

Then, every participant played the first game

Every game was played for 15 minutes. If the participant solved the game prior to 15 minutes, they were asked to continue restarting their game until the time limit. If they were in the expert conditions, then they played the TOH game (Box 1)

If they were in the non-expert condition, then they played the MC game (Fig. 2)

Then, the participant played the second game

All participants played the BG game (Fig. 1)

No participants were told that the BG game had the same rules as the TOH game

After the study was complete, the participant learned the true purpose of the study.

Results There were two dependent variables: (1) number of BG game solved, (2) duration of BG game (shorter avg. time indicated more skilled play)

Figure 5 shows the number of games solved according to condition (see Fig. 4 for conditions)

There were a significant effect of expertise (Kruskal-Wallis χ2 = 9.125, p = .003).

At first, we could not find a significant effect of mood (Kruskal-Wallis χ2 = 0.198, p = .657).

However, with the Zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression (specialized for zero-heavy data) we found that the expert dysphoric condition was a significant predictor (z = 3.19, p = .001).

For duration of game (shorter avg. time indicates better performance), there was only a significant effect of expertise.

Mood manipulation was successful.

Figure 5: Number of times the the BG game was solved according to condition

Discussion Our prediction was that the euphoric in-dividuals would outperform the dysphoric ones. Unexpectedly, we found the opposite. Dysphoric individuals did better at solving the BG game.

This was only true in the expert condition. It seems that mood makes no difference if there is no knowledge to back it up.

Our other prediction – that experts would outperform non-experts – was confirmed.

Our results have implications for religious movements and how emotion plays a role.

Euphoria may not have been as effective as we thought for transferring knowledge from your teachings to everyday life.

It could be that dysphoria is better for specifically procedural aspects of religion, such as the following of rituals.

If people are instilled with a sense of urgency about applying lessons to everyday life, then that might be a more effective method than simply making them joyful.