Actual Cleaning and Simulated Cleaning Attenuate Psychological and Physiological Effects of Stressful Events

Abstract

The human mind harbors various mechanisms for coping with stress, but what role does physical behavior play? Inspired by ethological observations of autogrooming activity across species, we offer a general hypothesis: cleaning attenuates effects of stressful events. Preregistered behavioral and psychophysiological experiments ( N = 3,066 in United Kingdom, United States, and Canada) found that (a) concrete visual simulation of cleaning behavior alleviated residual anxiety from a stress-inducing physical scene, an effect distinct from touch, and (b) actual cleaning behavior enhanced adaptive cardiovascular reactivity to a highly stressful context of social performance/evaluation, which provides the first physiological evidence for the attenuation of stress-related effects by cleaning. Overall, actual cleaning and simulated cleaning attenuate effects of physical or psychological stressors, even when they have nothing to do with contamination or disease and would not be resolved by cleaning. Daily cleaning behavior may facilitate coping with stressors like physical risks and psychological threats to the self.

Wipe it off: A meta-analytic review of the psychological consequences and antecedents of physical cleansing.

“…Second, among the meta-analyzed cleansing effects in reports presented by their authors as original experiments ( k effect = 401), only six effects came from preregistered studies, all in a single report (S. W. S. Lee, Millet, et al, 2023).…”

“…For example, during our revision process, an unpublished report and a conference presentation (which had already been available before the end of April 2022) were published as peer-reviewed journal articles. In such cases, we cite their most up-to-date version (e.g., S. W. S. Lee, Millet, et al, 2023;Meng & Gamlin, 2023) and use it for the purpose of our moderator coding (e.g., their "report type" would be coded as journal article, not unpublished report or conference presentation). 5 Examination was conducted by the first author together with either the second or third author.…”

“…Second, among the meta-analyzed cleansing effects in reports presented by their authors as original experiments (k effect = 401), only six effects came from preregistered studies, all in a single report (S. W. S. Lee, Millet, et al, 2023). Among the meta-analyzed effects in reports presented by their authors as unsuccessful replications (k effect = 49), 23 effects came from preregistered studies (the details of which are available in Supplemental Material D) and 26 effects came from non-pre-registered studies.…”

“…Beyond morality and disgust, studies of animal behavior have shown that stressors such as loud noises and conspecifics' screams elicit self-cleansing behavior among many species (e.g., pine voles, rats, primates; Leung & Borst, 1987;Mason et al, 1985;Reidinger et al, 1982;Spruijt et al, 1992). Dovetailing the link between stress and cleansing in animals, recent human experiments have found that cleansing reduces the affective and physiological effects of stressful events (S. W. S. Lee, Millet, et al, 2023), regardless of whether people actually engage in cleansing behavior or merely simulate it in their minds. Importantly, none of these stressors has anything to do with morality or disgust, suggesting that cleansing effects may be broader than predicted by earlier theories.…”

Three mechanisms of mind–body influence: Feelings, concepts, and procedures.

“…Cleansing oneself (vs. no cleansing or cleansing an object) has also been found to reduce the influence of an academic failure on subsequent pessimism and compensatory effort (Kaspar, 2013), the influence of successful and failing performance on subsequent optimism (Körner & Strack, 2019), the influence of product endowment on subsequent desire for product exchange (Florack et al, 2014), the influence of effort on subsequent feelings of ownership (A. Lee & Ji, 2015), and the influence of physical and social threats on subsequent affect and physiology (S. W. S. Lee, Millet, et al, 2020). These findings highlight that cleansing effects are observed in a variety of nonmoral, nondisgusting contexts, for both positive and negative entities (e.g., good and bad luck, successful and failing performance, endowment, threat).…”