Worship and Emotional Experience: Psychology of Group Practice
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Religion, Spirituality & Meaning-Making · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Group worship can become emotionally powerful because several psychological processes converge at the same time: shared sacred meaning, repeated ritual structure, collective attention, coordinated movement or voice, music, mutual observation, bodily arousal, and a sense of belonging. Psychology can study how these processes shape attention, emotion, memory, social connection, and behavior while leaving the truth and sacred significance of religious beliefs within the believer's religious and philosophical framework. Research on ritual supports a process-based view in which meaning and the physical structure of ritual jointly influence emotion and social connection. Hobson et al., 2018.
The emotional result is not uniform. Worship may be joyful, peaceful, solemn, awe-filled, grateful, grief-laden, penitential, hopeful, energized, quiet, or emotionally neutral. Some people cry, sing intensely, feel physically moved, or experience a strong sense of unity; others experience steadiness, reflection, duty, reverence, or little noticeable emotion. These differences can all occur within normal religious life. The psychological question is how a person's experience emerges from the interaction of practice, meaning, social context, expectations, personal history, and the immediate setting.
What Is Group Worship in Psychological Research?
“Group worship” is a useful umbrella phrase for collective religious practice, but it does not describe one universal activity. Religious gatherings differ in theology, ritual form, language, music, silence, bodily posture, leadership, frequency, sacred space, participation rules, and the meaning assigned to each action. A Christian liturgy, Jewish synagogue service, Muslim congregational prayer, Sikh kirtan, Hindu temple worship or procession, Buddhist chanting or recitation, and other communal religious practices can share psychological features while remaining distinct traditions with their own meanings. Scientific comparison is most useful when it preserves those distinctions rather than treating all worship as interchangeable.
Psychology therefore studies components that can occur within many group practices: repeated sequences, shared attention, synchronized action, singing or recitation, silence, collective responses, symbolic objects, sacred narratives, interpersonal proximity, and participation in a community. The broader ritual literature identifies emotion regulation and social connection as two major functions that can arise from ritualized behavior, while emphasizing that top-down meaning and bottom-up action work together. Hobson et al., 2018.
This distinction also clarifies the boundary of the evidence. An experiment on synchronized tapping or marching can tell us something about coordination and social bonding, but it cannot by itself explain worship. A study conducted in one denomination can illuminate that setting without becoming a model for every religion. The strongest account of worship combines general psychological mechanisms with evidence from real religious settings and with careful attention to the participant's own sacred interpretation.
Why Group Worship Can Intensify Emotion
Shared attention creates a common emotional frame
Collective practice often directs many people toward the same words, sounds, symbols, movements, stories, or sacred objects. Shared attention can make an event feel socially and emotionally consequential because participants know that others are orienting toward the same focal point. Contemporary work on collective gatherings describes this convergence of attention as one route through which individual emotion becomes socially amplified. Rimé & Páez, 2023.
In worship, shared attention is also interpretive. A hymn, recitation, prayer, silence, or ritual gesture is experienced within a religious framework that gives it meaning. Two outwardly similar actions may therefore have different psychological significance in different traditions, and the same action may affect two participants differently depending on belief, familiarity, memory, and personal relevance. Meaning is part of the mechanism rather than an optional layer added after the emotional response.
Ritual structure can organize uncertainty and emotion
Rituals typically contain recognizable sequences, rules, repetitions, and transitions. A major integrative review argues that these formal features can support regulation by organizing behavior and attention, while the meanings assigned to the ritual shape its emotional and social effects. Hobson et al., 2018. In a worship setting, predictability may provide a stable container for emotionally significant material: grief can be expressed within a known liturgy, gratitude within a familiar prayer, or communal celebration within a repeated festival form.
Predictability does not mean emotional flatness. Repetition can make a sequence familiar enough that attention is freed for meaning, memory, music, prayer, or social awareness. At other times, a ritual's departure from everyday behavior may heighten salience. Psychological effects depend on how structure is interpreted and enacted in the specific religious context.
Synchrony coordinates bodies, attention, and social perception
Many collective practices include some form of coordination: standing together, bowing, kneeling, swaying, processing, clapping, singing, chanting, reciting, or responding at common moments. A meta-analysis of 42 experimental studies with 4,327 participants found that experimentally induced interpersonal synchrony was associated with prosocial behavior, perceived social bonding, social cognition, and positive affect, although effect sizes differed by outcome and the studies were largely conducted in nonclinical settings. Mogan et al., 2017.
That evidence supports synchrony as one plausible mechanism within worship, while preserving an important limit: generic synchrony is not equivalent to religious practice. In worship, coordinated action is embedded in sacred meaning, community history, role expectations, and theology. The behavior can contribute to connection without exhausting the meaning of the practice.
Emotions can become socially aligned without becoming identical
Real-world ritual studies show that physiological and emotional alignment can emerge within collective settings. In a Spanish fire-walking ritual, heart-rate dynamics became synchronized between performers and closely related spectators, but not between performers and unrelated spectators, suggesting that social relationship and shared context mattered for the pattern. Konvalinka et al., 2011.
A 2024 naturalistic study of a Hindu procession compared the same group's emotionally laden ritual with an unstructured walk along the same route. Greater interpersonal proximity during the ritual was associated with stronger autonomic arousal synchrony, supporting a role for co-presence and cultural context in emotional alignment. Xygalatas et al., 2024. A separate naturalistic study of Islamic congregational prayer found that postural alignment was especially local while physiological alignment operated across a broader scale, illustrating that different forms of synchrony can coexist in one ritual. Saraei et al., 2024. These findings describe measurable coordination; they do not imply that participants have identical inner experiences.
Music, Singing, Chanting, and Recitation
Music and collective vocalization can organize timing, breathing, attention, memory, and emotion, which makes them especially important in many forms of communal religious practice. Yet their role differs sharply across traditions. Some services center congregational singing, some emphasize recitation, some use instruments, some restrict them, and some place substantial value on silence. Psychological research is most informative when it treats these forms as culturally situated rather than assuming that emotional intensity requires music.
Evidence from group singing outside religion shows that singing can accelerate social bonding. In a seven-month semi-naturalistic study of adult education classes, newly formed singing groups showed a faster early increase in perceived closeness than craft or creative-writing groups, although the comparison groups caught up over time. Pearce et al., 2015. This suggests that coordinated vocal activity can help explain part of the social experience of congregational singing, while leaving religious meaning as a separate and essential dimension.
Religious-context evidence points in the same direction but is more tradition-specific. A study of 1,603 German-speaking Roman Catholics found that congregational singing during Mass was associated with reported spiritual and social experiences, with religious and musical attitudes helping to predict those experiences. Wald-Fuhrmann et al., 2020. Because the study was cross-sectional and focused on one tradition, it supports a context-specific association rather than a universal claim about worship.
A smaller experimental study with 60 believers examined worship under different music conditions and found that the ability to focus attention on God was associated with stronger reported religious experience; religious worship music also differed from secular music in the intensity of reported divine-presence experience. Walter & Altorfer, 2022. The sample and experimental format limit generalization, but the study is useful because it shows how attention, music, and religious intention can interact rather than acting as isolated variables.
Collective Effervescence: A Useful Concept With Clear Limits
The term collective effervescence describes episodes of heightened shared emotional activation and a strong sense of unity during collective gatherings. In contemporary psychological work, the concept is often operationalized through emotional synchrony, communal sharing, group identity, self-transcendent emotion, and related experiences. A 2022 meta-analytic review integrating 50 studies and 182,738 participants found strong associations between collective effervescence and individual emotion, especially self-transcendent emotions, as well as communal sharing and several forms of social integration. Pizarro et al., 2022.
Collective effervescence can help describe why some worship gatherings feel unusually powerful, unified, or emotionally expansive. It is a psychological construct rather than a synonym for worship itself, religious faith, the presence of the sacred, or spiritual authenticity. A quiet service may be deeply meaningful without high arousal. A highly emotional gathering may be religiously meaningful for participants while also containing general social processes found at concerts, demonstrations, festivals, or other collective events.
This distinction protects both scientific precision and religious meaning. Psychology can identify attention, synchrony, appraisal, social identity, and physiological arousal within an event. It does not convert the event into “nothing but” those processes, and it does not use those processes to establish or reject theological interpretations.
What Recent Field Research Shows About Bonding and Positive Affect
The strongest recent evidence comes from studies that measure people before and after real gatherings rather than asking only about general attendance. In a 2021 field study comparing Christian services with secular Sunday Assembly gatherings, both settings showed increases in social bonding and positive affect and decreases in negative affect after the ritual. Change in positive affect predicted change in bonding. Charles et al., 2021. Because a secular comparison produced similar patterns, the results support general collective mechanisms while leaving the specifically religious meaning of worship to be studied separately.
A 2026 preregistered multisite field study assessed 265 participants at 24 religious ritual sites in the United Kingdom and Brazil before and after participation. Social bonding increased by 5.4% and positive affect by 13.1% on the study's measures. Increases in bonding were independently associated with changes in pain threshold, positive affect, and connection to a higher power. Charles et al., 2026. The pain-threshold measure was used as a proxy for mu-opioid activity, so the study does not constitute a direct assay of brain opioid release. The naturalistic pre/post design also warrants care when making causal claims about any single mechanism.
Longer-term social patterns are harder to establish because people choose communities, traditions, and levels of participation for many reasons. Network research in rural South India found that people who participated together in collective religious rituals were more likely to have supportive relationships and were more densely embedded in networks of co-participants; the pattern was especially evident for recurrent, lower-arousal monthly worship. Power, 2018. This is observational evidence, so it supports an association between co-participation and social support rather than a simple one-way causal story.
A 2024 field study of a low-arousal ancestor ritual in Japan likewise found that ancestral beliefs and active participation were associated with several measures of social cohesion, while anxiety and prosocial outcomes varied by belief and participation status. Irving et al., 2024. Together, these studies argue against a single formula in which “more arousal” automatically produces “better outcomes.” Low-arousal, repeated, family-centered, or contemplative practices can also organize belonging and emotion.
Why People May Cry During Worship
Tears during worship can arise through several ordinary emotional pathways. People may experience awe, gratitude, relief, grief, repentance, longing, joy, reconciliation, memory, music-evoked emotion, interpersonal connection, or a sense of sacred presence. Tears can also accompany mixed emotions that are difficult to separate into a single label. In a group setting, shared attention and perceived emotional synchrony may intensify these experiences, while music and ritual structure can make personally significant memories or meanings especially salient. Pizarro et al., 2022.
Psychology does not assign one universal meaning to such tears. The same visible response can have different meanings for different people, and a person can experience deep religious significance without crying. Emotional expression is shaped by personality, culture, tradition, learned display rules, current stress, personal history, and the specific service. The participant's own interpretation is therefore central to understanding the experience.
High-Arousal and Low-Arousal Worship Are Psychologically Different
Some collective practices use strong rhythm, movement, loud singing, dense crowds, call-and-response, or dramatic transitions. Others emphasize silence, controlled recitation, stillness, slow movement, repeated liturgy, or quiet contemplation. These styles recruit partly overlapping processes while creating different arousal profiles. Research on collective ritual includes both intense events and recurrent low-arousal practices, and social connection has been observed in both. Power, 2018; Irving et al., 2024.
This matters because emotional intensity is not a universal measure of religious engagement. In some traditions and communities, restraint, attentiveness, reverence, discipline, or silence may carry more religious significance than visible excitement. Psychological descriptions should therefore avoid ranking styles of worship by emotional magnitude or treating high-arousal experiences as the benchmark against which quieter practices are judged.
Belonging, Identity, and the Meaning of “We”
Group worship often places the individual inside a shared story: common language, sacred memory, moral commitments, festivals, songs, prayers, spaces, and relationships. These elements can make social identity emotionally vivid. Collective-effervescence research consistently links shared emotional activation with communal sharing and group identification, while ritual research describes social connection as a central domain of effect. Pizarro et al., 2022; Hobson et al., 2018.
Belonging can be experienced at several levels at once: connection to familiar people, to a local congregation, to a broader religious tradition, to ancestors or future generations, and to what the participant understands as sacred or divine. These levels should not be collapsed into one generic “group effect.” The psychological experience of community may be inseparable, for the participant, from theological meaning and religious identity.
The same group process can also be experienced differently by people who are new, marginal, uncertain, grieving, socially anxious, sensory-sensitive, questioning their faith, or navigating conflict with a community. A psychologically complete account therefore includes both the capacity of worship to create connection and the fact that participation does not guarantee belonging for every attendee.
Embodied Participation and Physiological Arousal
Worship is often embodied. Posture, breathing, vocalization, movement, touch, spatial arrangement, and proximity can influence arousal and attention. Field studies show that collective rituals can produce measurable coupling in heart-rate or autonomic patterns under some conditions. Konvalinka et al., 2011; Xygalatas et al., 2024. Such findings help explain how social events become bodily experiences.
Physiological alignment should be interpreted carefully. Similar heart-rate dynamics do not mean that people share identical thoughts, emotions, or spiritual experiences. Measures such as skin conductance, heart rate, or pain threshold are indirect indicators of particular physiological processes, and the leap from a proxy measure to a complete neurobiological explanation is larger than popular summaries sometimes imply.
A 2026 systematic review of 105 neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies across multiple religious and spiritual practices found distributed patterns involving several cortical, limbic, and large-scale networks, with substantial heterogeneity across practices and methods. Husain et al., 2026. For group worship specifically, the evidence does not justify a single “worship center” in the brain. Neural findings describe correlates of practices and experiences; they do not adjudicate sacred truth claims.
Why Some People Feel Little or No Emotion During Worship
A muted emotional response can be a normal variation. Worship may function for a person through commitment, reflection, duty, moral orientation, communal identity, tradition, contemplation, or intellectual engagement rather than through strong affect. Familiarity can reduce novelty while increasing meaning; fatigue, distraction, stress, sensory conditions, or the particular style of service can also influence the moment.
Expectations matter as well. In a community where visible emotion is common, a person who remains calm may worry that something is wrong with their faith or participation. Psychology offers no basis for using emotional intensity as a universal measure of spiritual sincerity. Emotional style varies across individuals and religious cultures, and the absence of a dramatic response does not by itself indicate psychological or religious deficiency.
When Group Emotion Feels Difficult
Collective emotion can be supportive and moving, and it can also be demanding. Dense crowds, loud sound, prolonged standing, strong sensory stimulation, unfamiliar practices, grief-related material, interpersonal tension, or expectations about public expression may be uncomfortable for some participants. A person may value the religious meaning of worship while finding parts of the sensory or social environment difficult.
Social influence is also part of every group setting. People use others' behavior to interpret what is happening, and visible emotion can shape expectations about how one is supposed to respond. This does not make the emotion artificial; human emotion is routinely social. It does mean that researchers and clinicians should distinguish personally experienced meaning from assumptions that a crowd response tells us exactly what every individual felt.
Communities can support psychological accessibility by allowing legitimate variation in posture, expression, sensory needs, participation intensity, and emotional style where the tradition permits it. From a psychological standpoint, making room for variation reduces the pressure to perform a particular emotional state and makes it easier to understand each person's experience on its own terms.
Worship, Mental Health, and Clinical Boundaries
Group worship can provide meaning, routine, social support, identity, and emotionally significant experiences. Those functions may be relevant to well-being, yet immediate emotional uplift after a service is different from treatment of a mental disorder. Evidence about worship should therefore be described at the level actually measured: affect, bonding, perceived support, physiological arousal, or other defined outcomes. It should not be converted into a guarantee of clinical benefit or a replacement for psychotherapy, psychiatric care, or medical treatment.
Religious emotion itself is not a diagnosis. Crying, feeling awe, sensing sacred significance, becoming deeply absorbed in prayer or song, or experiencing strong communal emotion can all occur in culturally normative religious life. Clinical assessment becomes relevant when a person reports distress, loss of functioning, loss of voluntary control, dangerous behavior, severe sleep or mood disruption, persistent symptoms outside the expected religious context, or other features that require professional evaluation. The content of a belief or practice is never sufficient on its own.
A related boundary concerns compulsive religious behavior. Repeated prayer, confession, ritual checking, or reassurance can become part of obsessive-compulsive disorder when the behavior functions as a compulsion driven by obsessional fear and an escalating demand for certainty. The canonical clinical guide is Scrupulosity OCD: What Is It? Religious Obsessions, Moral Fear, Rituals, Guilt, and Treatment. Ordinary repetition within worship and OCD compulsions can look similar from the outside, so function, distress, flexibility, context, and impairment matter more than appearance alone.
Another boundary concerns culturally sanctioned trance or possession-related practices. Clinical classification requires careful attention to cultural context, voluntariness, distress, and impairment rather than treating an unusual state as pathological because it is unfamiliar. See Trance Disorder and Possession Trance Disorder: ICD-11 and Cultural Context for the clinical framework. This distinction is especially important when clinicians encounter intense worship experiences outside their own religious background.
What Culturally Competent Clinicians Ask About Worship
Religion and spirituality are dimensions of human diversity that can be clinically relevant when the client considers them important. Vieten and Lukoff argue that psychologists need specific religious and spiritual competencies in attitudes, knowledge, and skills, including the ability to inquire respectfully about these domains. Vieten & Lukoff, 2022. Applied to worship, this means understanding the practice from within the client's tradition before interpreting its emotional or behavioral form.
Useful assessment questions concern meaning and function: What does this practice mean to you? Is this experience expected within your tradition? Does participation feel chosen, supportive, obligatory, frightening, or mixed? What happens before, during, and after the service? Does the experience improve or disrupt daily functioning? How do trusted members or leaders within your tradition understand it? These questions are more informative than asking whether a practice looks unusual to an outside observer.
When a client's faith is important, culturally competent care can include collaboration with an appropriate religious or spiritual leader when the client wants it and when roles are clear. Psychological care and pastoral or spiritual care have different professional functions. Respectful collaboration works best when it preserves the client's autonomy, confidentiality, clinical safety, and religious commitments.
What the Research Can Establish — and What It Cannot
The evidence supports several conclusions with reasonable confidence. Coordinated action can increase social bonding in experimental settings; collective gatherings can amplify and align emotion; real religious rituals can be associated with short-term changes in positive affect and bonding; singing can accelerate bonding; and sacred or religious meaning can shape how these processes are experienced. Mogan et al., 2017; Charles et al., 2026.
The evidence is thinner for universal claims about “worship” as one category. Religious traditions vary enormously, and much research focuses on a limited number of settings, countries, or highly visible ritual forms. Many studies rely on self-report, convenience samples, cross-sectional associations, or pre/post designs without random assignment. People who attend a ritual differ from those who do not in belief, motivation, relationships, health, personality, and social context, which creates selection and confounding problems.
Naturalistic research solves one problem and creates another. It captures worship as people actually practice it, preserving cultural meaning and group dynamics, but researchers have less experimental control. Laboratory research offers stronger control over synchrony, music, or attention, but often strips away the sacred meaning that makes worship psychologically distinctive. The two approaches should be read together rather than treated as competing sources of truth.
Cross-cultural generalization also requires discipline. A finding from Roman Catholic Mass, Islamic congregational prayer, Hindu procession, Japanese ancestor ritual, or a Brazilian religious gathering is evidence about that context and a contribution to comparative theory. It is not automatically evidence about all religions. Stronger future research will need multisite designs, preregistration, longitudinal follow-up, culturally grounded measurement, and direct comparison of multiple forms of worship.
A Process Model of Emotional Experience in Group Worship
The existing literature supports a practical process model. First, the setting establishes a shared frame through sacred place, time, symbols, roles, and expectations. Second, ritual structure organizes attention and action. Third, music, recitation, movement, posture, or silence shape arousal and timing. Fourth, participants perceive one another and may become behaviorally or emotionally synchronized. Fifth, personal memories, beliefs, identity, and current life circumstances determine what the shared event means to each person. Finally, the person interprets the resulting emotion through the religious language and concepts available within the tradition.
No single stage is required in every service, and the stages do not form a rigid sequence. Their value is explanatory: they show why the same gathering can be simultaneously social, embodied, cognitive, emotional, cultural, and religious. They also explain why two people standing next to each other can participate in the same ritual while experiencing different emotions and assigning different meanings to those emotions.
This process model also clarifies why psychological explanation and religious interpretation can coexist. Psychology describes patterns in attention, coordination, appraisal, memory, physiology, and social connection. Religious traditions interpret worship within their own accounts of sacred reality, obligation, grace, revelation, devotion, covenant, liberation, enlightenment, community, or other theological concepts. The scientific study of human experience does not require collapsing one level into the other.
Practical Implications for Religious Communities
Research suggests that participation matters, but “participation” should be understood broadly. Singing is one route to coordination; responsive reading, shared silence, posture, processions, repeated prayer, service roles, and other practices can also create shared structure and attention. Communities therefore have multiple ways to cultivate belonging within the boundaries of their tradition.
Emotional diversity deserves explicit room. When communities imply that one visible response is the expected sign of genuine faith, people with quieter emotional styles can experience unnecessary self-doubt. A psychologically informed approach treats emotion as meaningful data about a person's experience rather than as a universal test of spiritual standing.
Accessibility also matters. Group practices can be physically, sensory, or socially demanding. Clear expectations, opportunities for less intensive participation when appropriate, and respect for disability or sensory needs can help more people engage without turning worship into a performance of endurance. These are practical implications of individual-difference research rather than judgments about liturgical or theological norms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does worship make people emotional?
Worship can concentrate several emotion-producing processes at once: personally important beliefs, shared attention, music or recitation, memories, ritual structure, coordinated action, social connection, and bodily arousal. Any one of these can shape emotion; together they can make an experience especially powerful. The relative contribution of each factor differs by person, tradition, and service. Hobson et al., 2018.
Why do some people cry during worship?
Tears can accompany awe, gratitude, grief, relief, repentance, hope, joy, memory, interpersonal connection, music-evoked emotion, or a personally meaningful sense of the sacred. Psychology cannot infer a single cause from tears alone. The person's own interpretation and religious context are central.
Does group worship make people feel more connected?
Several field and experimental literatures support a relationship between coordinated collective practice and social bonding. Real-world religious ritual studies have found increases in bonding after participation and associations between co-participation and supportive social ties. Charles et al., 2026; Power, 2018. The strength and persistence of that connection vary, and participation does not guarantee belonging for every person.
Is collective effervescence the same as a religious experience?
Collective effervescence is a psychological construct describing intense shared emotional activation and unity in collective settings. Religious experience is broader and is defined within personal and religious frameworks; it can occur in quiet, solitary, low-arousal, or communal forms. Collective effervescence can be one feature of some worship experiences without defining the category. Pizarro et al., 2022.
Is singing necessary for the emotional effects of worship?
No single practice is necessary across religions. Singing can accelerate bonding and shape attention and affect, but many traditions use recitation, silence, movement, posture, contemplation, or other forms. Research has documented meaningful social effects in both high-arousal and low-arousal rituals. Pearce et al., 2015; Irving et al., 2024.
Why do I feel nothing during worship when other people seem emotional?
Emotional intensity varies normally. Personality, culture, current mood, familiarity, attention, sensory environment, expectations, and the meaning of a particular service all shape response. A calm or subtle experience can coexist with strong commitment, reverence, reflection, or belonging. Psychology does not provide a scale on which visible emotion measures the sincerity of faith.
Can an intense worship experience be a sign of mental illness?
Intensity by itself does not establish a clinical disorder. Assessment depends on cultural and religious context, voluntariness, duration, distress, functional impairment, associated symptoms, and whether the experience occurs within an expected practice. Clinicians need religious and spiritual competence so that culturally normative experiences are understood in context. Vieten & Lukoff, 2022.
Can worship replace psychotherapy or medical treatment?
Worship can be an important source of meaning, belonging, support, and religious life. Clinical treatment addresses different needs and is evaluated using different evidence. When a mental health or medical condition requires professional care, worship can remain personally important alongside appropriate treatment rather than being framed as a guaranteed substitute.
Related Articles
Scrupulosity OCD: What Is It? Religious Obsessions, Moral Fear, Rituals, Guilt, and Treatment — the clinical boundary between ordinary religious practice and obsession-driven compulsions.
Trance Disorder and Possession Trance Disorder: ICD-11 and Cultural Context — culturally informed assessment when trance or possession-related experiences become a clinical question.
References
Charles, S. J., van Mulukom, V., Brown, J. E., Watts, F., Dunbar, R. I. M., & Farias, M. (2021). United on Sunday: The effects of secular rituals on social bonding and affect. PLOS ONE, 16(1), e0242546. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242546
Charles, S. J., van Mulukom, V., Dunbar, R., Brown, J. E., Delmonte, R., Maraldi, E., Turner, L., Watts, F., Watts, J., & Farias, M. (2026). Religious rituals in the United Kingdom and Brazil are associated with increased social bonding and pain threshold. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 293(2073), 20261174. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2026.1174
Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317734944
Husain, W., Ammar, A., Wusqa, U.-T., Farooq, M., Tariq, Z., Pandi-Perumal, S. R., BaHammam, A. S., Trabelsi, K., Griffiths, M. D., Pakpour, A., & Jahrami, H. (2026). The neuroscience of religious and spiritual practices: A systematic review of neurotheological evidence. Brain and Behavior, 16(9), e71733. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.71733
Irving, B., Kavanagh, C., Fischer, R., & Yuki, M. (2024). Dance for the dead: The role of top-down beliefs for social cohesion and anxiety management in naturally occurring collective rituals. PLOS ONE, 19(3), e0291655. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291655
Konvalinka, I., Xygalatas, D., Bulbulia, J., Schjødt, U., Jegindø, E. M., Wallot, S., Van Orden, G., & Roepstorff, A. (2011). Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(20), 8514–8519. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016955108
Mogan, R., Fischer, R., & Bulbulia, J. A. (2017). To be in synchrony or not? A meta-analysis of synchrony's effects on behavior, perception, cognition and affect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 13–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.03.009
Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2(10), 150221. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150221
Pizarro, J. J., Zumeta, L. N., Bouchat, P., Włodarczyk, A., Rimé, B., Basabe, N., Amutio, A., & Páez, D. (2022). Emotional processes, collective behavior, and social movements: A meta-analytic review of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 974683. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.974683
Power, E. A. (2018). Collective ritual and social support networks in rural South India. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 285(1879), 20180023. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0023
Rimé, B., & Páez, D. (2023). Why we gather: A new look, empirically documented, at Émile Durkheim's theory of collective assemblies and collective effervescence. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(6), 1347–1370. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221146388
Saraei, M., Paxton, A., & Xygalatas, D. (2024). Aligned bodies, united hearts: Embodied emotional dynamics of an Islamic ritual. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1911), 20230162. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0162
Vieten, C., & Lukoff, D. (2022). Spiritual and religious competencies in psychology. American Psychologist, 77(1), 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000821
Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Boenneke, S., Vroegh, T., & Dannecker, K. P. (2020). “He Who Sings, Prays Twice”? Singing in Roman Catholic Mass leads to spiritual and social experiences that are predicted by religious and musical attitudes. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 570189. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.570189
Walter, Y., & Altorfer, A. (2022). The psychological role of music and attentional control for religious experiences in worship. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 75(12), 2272–2286. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221075330
Xygalatas, D., Lang, M., Maňo, P., Krátký, J., & Fischer, R. (2024). Emotional contagion in a collective ritual. American Journal of Human Biology, 36(12), e24111. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.24111