United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect

Abstract

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.

Assessing Vocal Chanting as an Online Psychosocial Intervention

“…The Inclusion of Other in Self Scale (IOS; Aron et al, 1992) is used to measure perceived connection to others. The IOS has been used in repeated-measures designs to assess explicit feelings of connection to other people, and changes in feelings of connectedness following interventions (Agnew et al, 2004;Vezzali et al, 2012;Charles et al, 2020Charles et al, , 2021. The questionnaire includes seven pairs of circles, or Venn diagrams as shown in Figure 3.…”

“…The IOS was used as the last item on the composite measure, however, participants were asked "Which circle best describes your relationship with other people in general?" The formation of the composite outcome variable was based on procedures used to form a composite variable in previous studies of the effect of rituals on mood and social bonding (Charles et al, 2020(Charles et al, , 2021. The internal consistency for the combined measure was acceptable at both time 1 (α = 0.84) and time 2 (α = 0.87).…”

Affect, Belief, and the Arts

“…Significances and emotional associations are strengthened through the collective effervescence of ritual participation which uniquely achieves the hermetic bonding of groups of individuals into communities (Durkheim, 1915 ). Ritual has positive effects on social bonding and affective state (Charles et al, 2021 ). The emotional state which emerges from group ritual is sometimes called communitas , it stands apart from rational forms of organization and profane activities of the society (Turner, 1969 ).…”

The importance of imagination and subjective knowledge: The evolution of art and religion as symbolic representations of feelings, experiences, and beliefs

“…In a series of fieldwork and laboratory studies, Charles and colleagues have demonstrated that attending a religious ritual together increases social bonding Charles, van Mulukom, Brown, et al, 2020;Charles et al, manuscript). Importantly, increases in social bonding after rituals were predicted by increases in positive affect and feelings of connectedness to something bigger during religious rituals , an effect which was replicated for secular ritual attendance (Charles, van Mulukom, Brown, et al, 2020), as well as in an additional lab experiment, which involved five weeks of either spiritual or secular yoga rituals (Charles et al, manuscript), with no significant differences between the two groups. Charles and colleagues suggested that the 'Broaden and Build' hypothesis (Fredrickson, 2004(Fredrickson, , 2013Waugh & Fredrickson, 2006) might explain some of the results.…”