Groups and Emotional Arousal Mediate Neural Synchrony and Perceived Ritual Efficacy

Abstract

We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. Using a novel protocol, EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The results revealed distinct neural signatures and behavioral patterns between the experimental conditions. Arousal levels predicted ratings of ritual efficacy. Increased efficacy was marked by suppressed alpha and beta power, regardless of group or individual setting. In groups, efficacy ratings converged. Individual setting showed increased within-participant phase synchronization in alpha and beta bands, while group setting enhanced between-participant theta phase synchronization. This reflected group participants' orientation toward a common perspective and social coordination. These findings suggest that co-presence in groups leads to a social-tuning effect supported by between-participant theta phase synchrony. Together these neural synchrony patterns reveal how collective rituals have both individual and communal dimensions. The emotionality of spirit-medium rituals drives individual perceptions of efficacy, while co-presence in groups signals the significance of an event and socially tunes enhanced agreement in perceptual ratings. In other words, mass gatherings may foster social cohesion without necessarily requiring group-size scaling limitations of direct face-to-face interaction. This could have implications for the scaling computability of synchrony in large groups as well as for humanistic studies in areas such as symbolic interactionism.

Emotional arousal due to video stimuli reduces local and inter-regional synchronization of oscillatory cortical activities in alpha- and beta-bands

“…Hanslmayr et al reported that the power and phase synchrony in alpha-band were decreased for enhanced sensory processing due to externally oriented states [36]. Consistently with our results on inter-regional functional connectivity, Cho et al showed significant decrease of alpha-band phase locking value due to the higher arousal level of rituals [37].…”

The Development of Identity Fusion

“…Future research could explore the neural substrates of the self-defining group experiences proposed to be critical for fusion via the shared-experience pathway. For instance, when adult believers watched videos of religious rituals, a group setting induced neural synchrony among watchers—social tuning effects—as measured by theta-phase synchrony from electroencephalography data (Cho et al, 2018). Perhaps the study of neural substrates could even differentiate between the heightened sense of self proposed with fusion and the subsumed sense of self with group identification better than the current self-report measures (see Apps et al, 2018).…”

Being in a crowd bonds people via physiological synchrony

“…Paying attention to the socio-environmental context of these shared experiences may therefore be key to understanding how group cohesion comes about. For example, does sharing an event revolve around attending to the same stimuli and thus imagining that one’s emotions and thoughts are shared with others, or does it also involve more fundamental adjustments, such as the inter-personal synchronization of physiological states 30 ? Further, how is this synchronization affected by sharing the experience directly, by being physically co-present, as opposed to indirectly or vicariously, by observing the same event remotely?…”