Cuteness And Self-Compassion: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Like humans, octopuses have both an active and quiet stage of sleep, reports Rodrigo Pérez Ortega at Science. Researchers found that for 30-40 minutes of sleep the creatures are fairly still with pale skin, but for about 40 seconds their skin turns darker and they move their eyes and body. In humans, dreaming happens in the active, REM stage, but scientists still don’t know whether the octopuses also dream during their active sleep.

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During the pandemic we haven’t only missed out on socialising — we’ve also been deprived of novel experiences. And a lack of novelty can be detrimental to our wellbeing and even our cognitive functioning, writes Richard A Friedman at The Guardian.

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A growing body of evidence suggests that sustaining head injuries in sports raises the risk of players developing neurodegenerative diseases. Now a longitudinal study following a cohort of Americans has found that even mild head injuries can increase the risk of dementia, reports Sara Harrison at Wired. The team also found that the increase in risk was greater for women than men and for White than Black people, but more work is needed to understand these differences.

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What’s going on in our brains when we look at a cute little baby or kitten? At Science Focus, Thomas Ling explores the neuroscience of cuteness.

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Some people who have recovered from Covid-19 report a loss of smell — or experience previously nice smells as unpleasant. And that can have devastating social consequences, writes Alyson Krueger at The New York Times: many sufferers report that they are no longer able to be intimate with loved ones or eat meals with friends and family.

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Scientists have looked at the personality and cognitive abilities of “psychonauts”, people who experiment with psychedelic drugs and document their experiences. This group showed high levels of sensation-seeking and risk-taking, report the researchers, Barbara Sahakian and George Savulich, at The Conversation. But they didn’t have any deficits in learning and memory (unlike a group of “club drug” users who were seeking help for addiction), suggesting that they were avoiding harmful patterns of drug use.

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Being kind to ourselves is vital for our wellbeing and personal growth — and yet a lot of us are not very good at it. At Psyche, Christina Chwyl examines the research around self-compassion, and explores how we might become better friends to ourselves.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Students Who Want To Cut Down On Their Drinking Often Feel Forced To Compromise For Social Connection

By Emily Reynolds

Drinking culture is a huge part of university, with Freshers’ Week events often revolving near-exclusively around getting drunk. A 2018 survey from the National Union of Students found that 76% of respondents feel an expectation for students to “drink to get drunk”; 79% agreed that “drinking and getting drunk” is a key part of university culture.

This isn’t for everyone, however: a quick search of student forums will show many young people, pre-university, anxious about a drinking culture they don’t want to participate in. Now a new study in the British Journal of Health Psychology, authored by Dominic Conroy from the University of East London and team, has taken a closer look at students’ decisions to reduce their alcohol consumption — and what prevents them from doing so.

Participants were ten undergraduate students from the UK, all of whom had undergone a transition in their drinking habits, decreasing or stopping altogether. The students had different levels and patterns of drinking: some were light drinkers or completely teetotal, while others were more moderate drinkers.

The students took part in semi-structured interviews with one of the paper’s authors, responding to open-ended questions related to their drinking. Two “dilemmas” emerged from the participants’ responses: wanting to drink less but being concerned about social ramifications, and wanting to cut down but worrying about social confidence and missing out on fun.

Resolving the first dilemma — wanting to cut down but being concerned about social ramifications — was considered “important yet difficult to achieve” for participants: not drinking often came with an in-built assumption that the person was “uninterested in socialising” altogether. One participant described involving himself in drinking games during Freshers’ Week purely to build social connections: “I think it would have been more difficult to make friends if I was avoiding drinking completely,” he said.

For multiple participants, there was a desire to recognise the connections between early-term socialising and the potential for friendship in the years ahead; drinking during the early stages of university was often part of that process. This balancing act wasn’t always easy: one participant, Kelly, said that being open about her drinking preferences led to people “making [her] feel weird” and that her relationship with her flatmates was “quite difficult” because of it.

The second dilemma — missing out on fun and social confidence brought on by alcohol — was also resonant in participants’ accounts of university life. Alice told the team that “as a sober person, I’m so much more in control… sometimes I think I would enjoy myself more if I was pissed and less inhibited”, pinpointing alcohol as a source of fun, good memories, and uninhibitedness.

Other participants, more moderate drinkers who had cut down, experienced a similar yearning for the fun of alcohol — but faced a further dilemma of trying to drink less than they had before or simply getting drunk as usual. Here, students felt trapped in a binary of either drinking a lot or drinking nothing.

The study had a small sample size and was not quantitative, so it’s hard to get an idea of how many students might be feeling this way or are being forced to compromise for the sake of their social lives. However, the insights from the conversations suggest a more complex picture of drinking at university than is sometimes understood.

There is a clear (and perhaps unsurprising) thread running through the findings that peer pressure or social norms are pushing students into drinking, or drinking more than one wants or intends to. One notable testimony suggested that there is little give-and-take on the part of students who do drink, with those who drink very little being forced to compromise instead. Those who don’t drink also miss out on social connections and fear they are missing out on fun.

Paying attention to these two broad dilemmas, and the individual issues they encapsulate, may be a way of understanding the issues students face when it comes to drinking, drug-taking and peer pressure during university. The team notes that the students interviewed often (perhaps inadvertently) demonstrated a “sober curious” attitude to drinking, an approach that has taken off in the media over the last few years. Promoting such an approach, which rejects strict dichotomies, may be one way of helping students manage their drinking in a way that feels right for them, shifting norms around alcohol at the same time.

– ‘Maturing Out’ as dilemmatic: Transitions towards relatively light drinking practices among UK University students

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Here’s What We Listen For When Deciding Whether A Speaker Is Lying Or Uncertain

By Emma Young

How do you know whether to trust what someone is telling you? There’s ongoing debate about which cues are reliable, and how good we are at recognising deception. But now a new paper in Nature Communications reveals that we reliably take a particular pattern of speech pitch, loudness and duration as indicating either that the person lying or that they’re unsure of what they’re saying — and that we do it without even being aware of what we’re tuning into.

In an initial study, Louise Goupil at Sorbonne University, France, and her team manipulated the pitch, loudness and duration of a series of spoken pseudo-words (which sounded like they could be real words in French, but were not). Twenty native French speakers then listened to these words and rated the speaker’s honesty and also their certainty (honesty and certainty were investigated in two separate trials with the same participants, held one week apart). The participants were also asked how confident they were in their judgements.

The team’s analysis revealed that a single “prosodic signature” — that is, the same pattern of volume, pitch, and speed — was associated with perceptions of both honesty and certainty. Loudness (especially at the beginning of the word), a lower pitch towards the end of the word, a less variable pitch overall, and a faster pace of speaking were all associated with more honesty/confidence. The opposite patterns were associated with less of either. The team also found that the participants were more confident when making judgements about the speaker’s certainty.

Of course, uncertainty and deception are not the same thing. A subsequent study involving two groups of 20 participants revealed that context — in this case, background information about what the speakers were purportedly doing when they uttered the pseudo-words — allows us to use the same vocal signature to make judgements about either honesty or confidence, depending on the situation. However, while there was widespread agreement when it came to judging confidence, the group was more split when judging honesty. While the data showed that the prosodic signature informed all their judgements, some of the participants decided that the speaker was faking an honest voice. This suggests that we rely heavily on sensory evidence in inferring a speaker’s level of confidence, but our judgements about whether they’re being truthful or not are more complex.

Further questioning of this same group of participants revealed that though they did indeed rely on the three-factor prosodic signature in making their judgements, they were to a large extent unaware of just what they were tuning into. The team also studied additional participants whose native languages included English, Spanish, German, Marathi, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese — and found the same results. “Overall, these results demonstrate the language independence of a core prosodic signature that underlies both judgements of certainty and honesty,” the team writes.

The researchers suggest that the prosodic signature is tied to signs of cognitive effort: someone who has to make more of an effort with what they’re saying — either because they aren’t very sure or because they’re lying — will take longer to say it, for example, and use less emphasis. That could explain why it is apparently not culture-dependent, but fundamental to all people.

A follow-up study by the team did reveal that when participants heard words spoken with the prosodic signature of unreliability/dishonesty, these words “popped out” against effortless speech, grabbing the participants’ attention. So perhaps, starting in young childhood, we learn to spot these signs of cognitive effort, and learn to interpret them as indicating uncertainty or dishonesty. Alternatively, it might be part of a more ancient, innate system, shaped through evolutionary pressures to know whom to trust.

The team also found some gender differences in explicit judgements about whether people were lying/uncertain. For example, women were more likely to interpret certain/honest signatures as being faked. However, the data can’t reveal whether these differences were down to gender per se, or other related factors, such as anxiety or empathy.

Clearly, there are questions still to be answered. But it’s fascinating and, as the researchers write: “Our results add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that, contrary to decades of research arguing that humans are highly gullible, dedicated mechanisms actually allow us to detect unreliability in our social partners effectively.”

There are some immediate practical implications, too. We evolved, of course, to interact face to face — and we can only use this prosodic signature when someone is talking to us, not if they are giving us information via a keyboard and screen. Whatever the benefits of this increasingly common way of interacting, the silencing of this particular method for spotting liars and hustlers is clearly a cost.

– Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Taking Lecture Notes On A Laptop Might Not Be That Bad After All

By Emma Young

“The pen is mightier than the keyboard”… in other words, it’s better to take lecture notes with a pen and paper rather than a laptop. That was the hugely influential conclusion of a paper published in 2014, by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer. The work was picked up by media around the world, and has received extensive academic attention; it’s been cited more than 1,100 times and, the authors of a new paper, also in Psychological Science, point out, it often features in discussions among educators about whether or not to ban laptops from classrooms. However, when Heather Urry at Tufts University, US, and her colleagues ran a direct replication of that original study, their findings told a different story. And it’s one that the team’s additional mini meta-analysis of other directly comparable replications supported: when later quizzed on the contents of a talk, participants who’d taken notes with a pen and paper did no better than those who’d used a laptop.

In the new replication, as in the original study, the 142 participants were all university students (this time at Tufts, rather than Princeton), who took notes while watching one of five roughly 15-minute-long TED talks. As before, there was then a roughly 30-minute delay during which they completed distractor tasks. After this, they completed a quiz on the facts and concepts presented in the talk.  

When the team analysed the data, they found that, as in the original study, participants who’d used a laptop to take notes recorded more words overall, and more verbatim phrases from the talk. Also as before, both groups performed equally well when it came to recalling the factual content of the talks. However, while Mueller and Oppenheimer found an advantage for longhand note-taking on the recall of concepts presented in the talks, Urry and her colleagues did not.

Despite the team’s efforts to replicate the original study as closely as possible, there were some differences between the two, however — including some that the researchers acknowledge could have affected the results. For example, more of the participants in the new study reported typically using taking class notes by hand. Also, in the original research, participants completed the study in a classroom, mostly in groups of two, and watched the talks on a screen at the front of the room. In this new research, about 80 of the participants completed the study outside of a class, and they viewed the talk on a laptop provided by the team. Many of these participants “noted that session were subject to distractions and errors,” the authors comment. This might have influenced the results.

Also, this is of course only one replication. So the team identified a total of eight studies (including theirs and two from the original paper) that they felt were sufficiently similar to be directly compared. This mini meta-analysis produced also failed to find an advantage for longhand note-taking on conceptual recall. 

Urry and her colleagues do accept that there were some limitations to all of these studies, including theirs. For example, TED talks are brief, and not hugely similar to typical university lectures; there are no pauses for extra note-taking or questions, for example. “Future studies should use approaches that better represent real-world settings,” the team recommends. Future studies should also consider new note-taking strategies (such as the use of styluses to write notes on a paper-like screen) as well as individual participants’ note-taking preferences. Also, there was only a 30-minute delay between watching the talk and being quizzed on it; this is not typical of real world university learning, either, so suggests caution in extrapolating from these results to likely impacts on actual students.

Still, given the influence of the original 2014 study, it’s important to note this failure to replicate, and the researchers’ cautionary conclusion: “Until future research determines whether and when note-taking media influence academic performance, we conclude that students and professors who are concerned about detrimental effects of computer note-taking on encoding information to be learned in lectures may not need to ditch the laptop just yet.”

– Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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The Experience Of Being “Tolerated”, Rather Than Accepted, Leads To Lower Wellbeing Among Ethnic Minority Groups

By Emily Reynolds

Tolerance is often touted as a progressive value, a way of ensuring that society offers equal opportunities to all. But it can also imply “putting up with” something or someone you fundamentally disagree with or dislike — being tolerated isn’t the same as being genuinely valued or respected, for example. As one writer puts it, tolerance has echoes “of at best grudging acceptance, and at worst ill-disguised hostility”.

Now a new study in the British Journal of Psychology has found that the experience of being tolerated takes its toll on the wellbeing of ethic monitories in the United States. Sara Cvetkovska from Utrecht University and colleagues find that the experience of being tolerated is closer to discrimination than it is to acceptance — impacting overall wellbeing and increasing negative mood.

In the first study, the team looked at how wellbeing related to the experience of being tolerated, compared to being accepted or discriminated against outright. Participants were non-white, belonged to a racial or ethnic minority group, and ranged from 17 to 73 years old.

First, participants answered questions about how frequently they felt they were being tolerated, accepted or discriminated against in several social contexts — at work, school, during leisure activities, at clubs or organisations, in their neighbourhood, on social media and overall. Tolerance was described as people objecting to particular cultural beliefs or practices but “putting up” with them nonetheless; discrimination referred to unjust treatment; while acceptance was described as a genuine appreciation for certain practices or ways of life.

Participants then rated themselves on five facets of wellbeing: positive and negative affect, self-esteem, life satisfaction and a sense of control. And while perceived acceptance, unsurprisingly, was associated with greater positive wellbeing, tolerance was associated with lower levels, with discrimination associated with the lowest levels of all.

In the second study, participants were asked the same questions about how often they felt they were being tolerated, discriminated against or accepted. This time, they also took part in a writing exercise, describing a particularly vivid instance of tolerance, discrimination or acceptance which they or someone they know had experienced. Participants then completed wellbeing measures as in the first study.

Once again, tolerance appeared to be an intermediate state for participants: wellbeing was higher in the tolerance condition than it was in the discrimination condition, but not as high as in the acceptance condition. But only positive and negative mood were affected by the writing task — more stable facets of wellbeing like self-esteem and perceived control were not.

In the final study, participants read that they worked at a company with a “casual Fridays” dress code. On one Friday they had come to work wearing a shirt with symbols reflecting their ethnic group: in the acceptance condition, their boss complimented them on the t-shirt and expressed interest in understanding its significance; in the tolerance condition the boss disapproved of the t-shirt but allowed it to be worn due to “freedom of expression”; and in the discrimination condition the boss actively banned the t-shirt from the workplace.

The participants then reported their positive and negative affect and how much the experience would threaten their identity — for example how negatively they felt about themselves or how powerless they thought they were. Again, tolerance was linked to greater wellbeing than discrimination but lower than acceptance. This time, people’s sense of identity was less threatened in the acceptance condition than in the tolerance condition. There was no significant difference between the discrimination and tolerance conditions in terms of social identity threat, however, suggesting the two, once again, are intimately linked.

Overall, the results suggest that “tolerance” may not be the best way of thinking about diversity. Though tolerance had less of a negative impact than discrimination, and while the two are distinct experiences, it was still linked to lower wellbeing than acceptance. This may be, as the team suggests, because tolerance shares the same negative appraisal of minority identity as discrimination — it’s just a bit more polite about it.

Future research could separate out responses somewhat: how an indigenous person experiences discrimination or tolerance is unlikely to be identical to the way a Black person would, for example. It would also be interesting to explore different kinds of relationships — in the final study, for example, the individual tolerating, accepting or discriminating was a boss. How would such behaviour impact wellbeing coming from a professional peer, another kind of authority figure, or even from a friend?

– Being tolerated: Implications for well‐being among ethnic minorities

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Astronauts And Ambivalence: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Researchers have used virtual reality to explore how art and nature elicit feelings of the sublime. The team compared people’s emotional responses when they saw a 360° VR version of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night to when they saw a realistic portrayal of the actual area depicted in the painting. They found that both VR videos induced sublime feelings — but participants’ responses were more intense for the naturalistic video, reports Sarah Wells at Inverse.

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We’re often expected to fall firmly on one side or the other of an issue — but is there something to be said for embracing ambivalence? Writing at Psyche, Iris Schneider highlights the benefits of holding two opposing opinions simultaneously.

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More on dolphin psychology this week: researchers have found that the marine creatures co-ordinate behaviour through vocal cues. Dolphins appear to use clicks to synchronise their jumps, for instance, while in another study, two dolphins who had to press buttons simultaneously to get a treat used whistles to co-ordinate. But not everyone is convinced that these are examples of intentional communication, as Christa Lesté-Lasserre reports at Science.

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Playing with ultra-thin dolls can leave young girls feeling they should be thinner themselves, writes researcher Lynda Boothroyd at The Conversation. Boothroyd’s team gave girls aged between five and nine either ultra-thin dolls or more realistic, child-like dolls to play with. The former group showed lower body satisfaction and a thinner “ideal self” after playing with the dolls.

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We’ve written a lot about lab-based trials of psychedelic drugs for treating mental health conditions — but now the first clinic to offer psychedelic-assisted treatment is about to open in the UK. Alexandra Jones has the story at The Guardian.

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Astronauts spending time in zero gravity could develop problems with emotion recognition, reports Sara Rigby at BBC Science Focus. To simulate long periods of weightlessness, participants spent 60 days lying in a bed that was tilted down towards their heads. The participants became slower at recognising facial expressions and tended to categorise expressions as angry more than happy or neutral. But it’s not clear whether microgravity itself caused these changes, or whether they were the result of spending long periods in isolation and confinement.

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Is psychology a form of secular mythology? That’s the argument made by Rami Gabriel at Aeon. Psychology satisfies our need to understand why we are like we are, for instance, and gives us guidance about how to live our lives — much like religious texts or the myths of the ancient world.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Autistic Children May Experience Less Variation In Their Bodily Emotional Responses

By guest blogger Dan Carney

Research into emotion processing in autistic people has mainly focused on how they understand others’ emotions. A more limited body of work into how autistic people process their own emotions has, however, suggested difficulties identifying and describing emotional experiences, and distinguishing between emotional states. The latter is potentially important, as it is associated with negative outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and self-injurious behavior, all of which have been suggested to occur more frequently in autism than in the general population.   

So far, studies of emotion differentiation in autism have tended to use language-based tasks. But now, a team led by Eleanor Palser from the University of California San Francisco has reported the first study looking at how autistic children map out where they feel emotions in their body. The team finds that compared to non-autistic children, the bodily emotion maps of autistic children are more similar across different emotions, suggesting less variability in the way they physically experience different emotional states. The research, published in the journal Autism, was partly based on a 2016 report from the charity Autistica, in which members of the autistic community identified sensory processing and affective difficulties as key research goals.

A key aspect of emotional experience is the bodily sensation and change brought about by different emotions (e.g. sweaty palms when nervous, heart pounding when excited). Researchers have created detailed bodily maps of the regions and sensations associated with different emotional states, but no one had directly studied how — and where — autistic people experience emotion in their bodies.

In the new study, the researchers asked autistic and non-autistic children and adolescents to produce body maps of various emotions using a pen-and-paper version of the emBODY emotion colouring task. The participants were asked to recall experiencing a particular emotion, then colour areas of stronger or faster resultant activity on one bodily outline, and those of weaker or slower activity on another. Six emotions — anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and disgust — were presented in a randomised order.

The team also used two tasks to measure interoception, one’s own awareness of internal bodily responses. Interoceptive sensibility, participants’ perceptions of their own interoception abilities, was assessed by asking them to indicate how often they feel common bodily sensations (e.g. goose bumps or stomach noises). A more objective measure of interoceptive accuracy was provided by examining how accurate participants were at a heartbeat-counting task.

On the colouring task, autistic participants showed less variability across emotions, with regard to the head, heart, and hands. In other words, they were more likely than non-autistic participants to colour these areas similarly, regardless of the emotion they were recalling.

Emotion maps produced by autistic and non-autistic children. Via Palser et al (2021)

Interestingly (and although the autistic group showed a lower level of interoceptive sensibility), these differences were not associated with interoceptive performance. This suggests that the bodily mapping task may tap into other aspects of emotion processing beyond simply the detection of one’s own physiological changes.

The researchers also speculate that the reduced emotion differentiation in the autistic group may — even on a relatively non-linguistic colouring task — still have been affected by the difficulties with emotion-based language that many autistic people experience, rather than interoceptive problems.

Furthermore, the fact that this task involved the recall of emotional events raises the possibility that episodic memory deficits may have played a role. The authors suggest that interventions focused on increasing children’s emotion word knowledge, or improving their memory of emotional events, may help to increase emotion differentiation. This is important because less variation in how people experience emotions has been linked to anxiety and depression, challenges which autistic people are more likely to experience.

Overall, this study offers the first indication that some autistic people may experience less variation in their physiological emotional responses. Given that this may not be fully explained by interoceptive difficulties, future work could investigate other skills involved in distinguishing between the bodily sensations associated with different emotions. Studies could also examine these abilities in other populations, to establish to what extent patterns may differ between groups.

– Reduced differentiation of emotion-associated bodily sensations in autism

Post written for BPS Research Digest by Dr. Dan Carney. Dan is a UK academic psychologist specialising in developmental disorders. He undertook his post-doctoral research fellowship at London South Bank University, finishing in 2013. His published work to date has examined cognition, memory, and inner speech processes in Williams syndrome and Down syndrome, as well as savant skills in autism.

At Research Digest we’re proud to showcase the expertise and writing talent of our community. Click here for more about our guest posts.

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These Two Factors Are Linked To The Experience Of Otherworldly Phenomena Across Cultures And Religions

By Emily Reynolds

Hearing voices is often associated with mental illness. But this belief doesn’t always reflect reality, with much research suggesting that many people who hear voices experience no distress and have never had contact with psychiatric services. Religious hearing of voices also has a tradition outside of what we might consider “pathological”: St. Augustine’s recognition of the voice of God, to use one very famous example.

Why do some of us hear otherworldly voices, while others don’t? According to Stanford University’s Tanya Marie Luhrmann and team, it could be related to two factors: “absorption” and “porosity”, both of which concern our beliefs and experiences about how the mind interacts with the world. In a study in PNAS that spanned a range of faiths and cultures, the team examined exactly how porosity and absorption can facilitate different kinds of spiritual experience.

“Porosity” refers to the view that the boundary between the mind and the world is permeable — that emotions “linger in a room”, or that some people can read minds. Porous views tend to be contrasted with the more secular idea that the mind is a discrete space, separate from the world. “Absorption”, on the other hand, is the tendency to be engrossed in sensory or imagined events — being able to “lose yourself” in music, films, or nature, for example.

The researchers looked at how these two factors were related to spiritual experiences among participants from the US, Ghana, Thailand, Vanuatu and China. Religions ranged from evangelical Christianity to Methodism to Buddhism to ancient practices found in Vanuatu.

The first study saw 300 adults with strong religious beliefs, either evangelical Christianity or a locally relevant religion, take part in two in-depth interviews conducted by on-site fieldworkers in churches, shrines and temples. One explored their experience of events in which they had felt a spiritual presence, and the other looked at how they understood and thought about the mind.

In the second interview, researchers probed belief in both porosity and absorption. Participants were presented with brief stories, each with different implications for the boundary between the mind and the world, and indicated how much they believed such an event could happen (e.g. the likelihood of someone becoming physically unwell because of a friend being angry with them). For absorption, participants indicated how much they agreed with statements such as “when I listen to music I can get so caught up in it that I don’t notice anything else”.

The second study replicated these methods with 766 adults from the general population in each country and 236 evangelical Christians, who were also asked how much they agreed with specific statements related to porosity (e.g. “spirits can read our thoughts and act on them even if we don’t speak them out loud”).

Interviews in both studies prompted stories about sensory experiences of otherworldly beings. Christian participants reported feeling the presence of god, whilst one Thai Buddhist participant, a nurse, told of an experience in which she calmly saw ghostly figures in the hospital where she worked. And while experiences differed across cultures, porosity and absorption were clear predictors of experiences of spiritual presence in different religions. 

In the final study, 505 participants from each country, who were all based in cities, completed the two measures of porosity, the absorption scale, and the two measures of spiritual presence events used in previous studies. They also completed two measures of “secular” or non-spiritual hallucination-like experiences (responding to questions such as “I hear the telephone ring and find that I am mistaken”) and the paranormal (e.g. “I am completely convinced that it is [impossible/possible] to send a “mental message” to another person”).

Again, higher levels of absorption and porosity predicted experience of spiritual events. Interestingly, this was also the case for secular events — hearing the phone ring, for example, or hearing music when it’s not being played — suggesting that porosity and absorption may have an impact on unusual sensory experiences even outside of religious contexts.

The results add further evidence for the need for openness around unusual sensory experiences. Both secular and religious experiences were recorded during the course of the study, with many participants not only unafraid but actively peaceful or calm, as in the example of the Thai Buddhist nurse. Christian participants also talked about the comforting presence of God.

The study suggests that unusual sensory experiences are common even among those who do not suffer from mental illness. But perhaps studies like this, which broaden our understanding of the nature and frequency of unusual sensory experiences, could also help break down the stigma of disorders in which such experiences often occur.

– Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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