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Category: Project

Description: While anxiety is a crucial motivational system to avoid hazards, people often face stressors that are beyond their control and that maladaptively perpetuate anxiety. It has been argued that ritual behavior is a naturally emerging coping strategy that help decrease excessive anxiety in these contexts. However, the exact mechanism facilitating these effects has rarely been studied. We argue that repetitive and rigid ritual sequences help the human cognitive-behavioral system to return to low-entropy states and assuage anxiety. We report a pre-registered test of this hypothesis using a Czech student sample (n = 268). All participants were exposed to anxiety treatment, and we manipulated the type of behavior participants performed while anxious. Specifically, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: ritualized movement/verbalization, control movement/verbalization, and baseline no-activity condition. Before, during, and after this manipulation, we measured cognitive anxiety using self-reports and physiological anxiety indexed by non-specific skin conductance responses. Overall, we found that the ritualized condition positively affected anxiety decrease assessed by self-reports and skin conductance, but this decrease was only slightly larger than in the other two conditions, and the between-condition differences were poorly estimated. We found the between-condition differences in the decrease of physiological anxiety to be well-estimated in participants more susceptible to anxiety induction. We conclude that the predictive aspect of ritualized behavior may play a role in the ritual anxiolytic effects. Yet, for rituals to be effective, the predictive aspects likely need to be bolstered by familiarity and belief in their efficacy. Pre-registration of the motor task: https://osf.io/fxj7d/ Pre-registration of the verbal task: https://osf.io/h2bnj/