Anxiety and Ritual Behavior: Testing the Relationship between Anxiety and Predictable Behavioral Patterns
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Ethnographers have long noted that rituals often occur during times of stress and anxiety such as wars, gambling, or sports. Since Malinowski’s seminal work in Trobriand Islands, it has been also argued that rituals may help reduce anxiety. Furthermore, in a parallel line of research, several scholars noted that these rituals have ‘obvious features’ that can be observed across various cultures. Such characteristics include redundancy, repetitiveness, and rigidity on various behavioral levels. Assuming that ritual is a natural response to anxiogenic situations, it could be hypothesized that induced anxiety should trigger ritual-like behavior. However, to date, this hypothesis lacks substantial empirical support. Together with a team of co-authors, we designed a study that manipulated anxiety and used motion-capture technology to quantify various characteristics of hand movements. We found that induced anxiety led to an increase in repetitiveness and rigidity, but not redundancy. Nevertheless, examining both psychological and physiological pathways revealed that repetitiveness and rigidity were predicted by an increase in heart rate, while self-perceived anxiety was a marginally significant predictor of redundancy. In the current paper, I will interpret these findings in the light of an entropy model of uncertainty, in which anxiety motivates organisms to return to familiar low-entropy states in order to regain a sense of control. I will further discuss our team’s next steps that include: 1) replicating this research with patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and 2) investigating the effects of predictable behavioral patterns on anxiety alleviation in a laboratory and during naturally occurring rituals. |
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