Religious delight: a non-functional approach to playful religious experiences

Abstract

Human emotions are emergent properties of biological, psychological, and cultural factors that influence and constrain each other. Natural selection shaped our emotional tendencies to maximize our individual ability to flexibly respond to threats and rewards in our environment. Emotions are also adaptive at the interpersonal level, helping us survive as members of groups. These functions are supported by evolved biological tendencies that we share with other animals. As such, human emotions are fundamentally biological-but they are also psychological in ways that cannot be easily reduced to biological factors. They are shaped by our conceptions of the world and our role in it and our appraisals of potential threats and rewards. Although some of these models (or individually held beliefs and norms) are driven by personal experience, many are informed by cultural models of emotions (or consensually and/or intersubjectively shared sets of beliefs and norms) and culturally-specific situational affordances that make some types of emotional experiences and behavior more likely and others less so. Thus, understanding the ways in which biological, psychological, and cultural factors jointly contribute to emotions is an important goal for research.Ariel Glucklich's book, The Joy of Religion (2020), offers a valuable contribution to the study of emotions, bringing in threads from evolutionary and psychological theory to offer a rich and nuanced treatment of an important set of underrecognized cultural models: those originating in religion. A historical lens-so often missing from the work on culture and emotion-is also offered here in an effort to trace origins of human concerns with mastery pleasure. Glucklich CONTACT Yulia Chentsova-Dutton