Religious rituals are associated with health benefits, potentially produced via social bonding. It is unknown whether secular rituals similarly increase social bonding. We conducted a field study with individuals who celebrate secular rituals at Sunday Assemblies and compared them with participants attending Christian rituals. We assessed levels of social bonding and affect before and after the rituals. Results showed the increase in social bonding taking place in secular rituals is comparable to religious rituals. We also found that both sets of rituals increased positive affect and decreased negative affect, and that the change in positive affect predicted the change in social bonding observed. Together these results suggest that secular rituals might play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect.

Does the experience of childbirth create social bonds among first-time mothers? Previous research suggests that sharing emotionally intense or painful experiences with others leads to "identity fusion," a visceral feeling of oneness with a group that predicts strong forms of prosocial action and self-sacrifice for other group members. This study compared identity fusion with other mothers during pregnancy versus after childbirth in a sample of 164 U.S. women. Eighty-nine mothers in our sample were pregnant with their firstborn, and 75 mothers had given birth to their firstborn up to 6 months prior to the time of data collection. Results demonstrated that identity fusion with other mothers was higher for postpartum mothers than for antenatal mothers. As predicted, among postpartum mothers, those who thought that their childbirth was more painful than a typical childbirth experience reported greater identity fusion with mothers who reported having had a very difficult birth. Postpartum mothers' ruminative thought about the birth mediated the association between level of dysphoria and identity fusion, and identity fusion moderated the association between postpartum mothers' ruminative and reflective thought about the birth and their posttraumatic growth in complex ways. These findings provide evidence that perceived sharedness of the childbirth experience and thoughts about the birth are important to the process of identity fusion with other mothers, and highlight the importance of post-event processing for psychological health.

Psychoactive drugs have been central to many human group rituals throughout modern human evolution. Despite such experiences often being inherently social, bonding and associated prosocial behaviors have rarely been empirically tested as an outcome. Here we investigate a novel measure of the mechanisms that generate altered states of consciousness during group rituals, the 4Ds: dance, drums, sleep deprivation, and drugs. We conducted a retrospective online survey examining experiences at a highly ritualized cultural phenomenon where drug use is relatively uninhibited- raves and illegal free parties. Engaging in the 4Ds at raves or free parties was associated with personal transformation for those who experienced the event as awe-inspiring, especially for people with open personalities (n = 481). Without awe, or a ritual context, indulging in the 4Ds was associated with a lack of personal growth, or anomie. A complex SEM revealed that personal transformation following awe-inspiring raves was associated with bonding to other ravers and prosocial behavior toward this group at a cost to self in a simple economic game. Bonding to humanity was not associated with these events. The findings suggest that employing the 4Ds in a ritualized environment - particularly dancing and drug use – can help build meaningful social bonds with associated positive behavioral outcomes.

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Meditation generally has small to moderate effects on health and well-being, but some people experience greater benefits from meditation than others. What are the characteristics of the study participants or meditation students that lead to beneficial outcomes of meditation? This chapter adopts a multilevel approach to evaluate the evidence on the relationship between participant characteristics and individual differences in meditation outcomes across four sources of variability: personality and other psychological variables, biological variables, illness severity, and demographic factors. Research in the area is sparse and has several methodological shortcomings, thus the authors recommend the use of multilevel models and meta-regression as ways of properly incorporating the study of individual differences with other variables.

Identity fusion-a visceral feeling of oneness with a group-is thought to result from the sharing of emotional, often dysphoric, experiences. In this pre-registered longitudinal study, we address the impact of flashbulb memories of learning about the outcome of the Brexit referendum on both identity fusion and social identification. As predicted, the visceral quality of people's flashbulb memories had a transformative effect on personal identity via processes of personal reflection and this, in turn, led to identity fusion via perceived sharedness with the group. Sharing personally transformative memories in this way did not lead to social identification, suggesting that perceived sharedness is key to identity fusion but not to social identification. Understanding how emotional public events impact personal identities and how they produce peculiar forms of group alignment have important implications for explaining and managing societal threats such as polarization and forms of political and religious extremism.Science pre-registration. Barbara Muzzulini performed the study. Valerie van Mulukom analysed the data. Barbara Muzzulini wrote the manuscript; Valerie van Mulukom, Rohan Kapitány, and Harvey Whitehouse provided critical feedback and revision.The data are publicly available in Open Science framework at the following link: osf.io/9d67f/.

Several episodic simulation studies have suggested that the plausibility of future events may be influenced by the disparateness of the details comprising the event. However, no study had directly investigated this idea. In the current study, we designed a novel episodic combination paradigm that varied the disparateness of details through a social sphere manipulation. Participants recalled memory details from three different social spheres. Details were recombined either within spheres or across spheres to create detail sets for which participants imagined future events in a second session. Across-sphere events were rated as significantly less plausible than within-sphere events, and were remembered less often. The presented paradigm, which increases control over the disparateness of details in future event simulations, may be useful for future studies concerned with the similarity of the simulations to previous events and its plausibility.