Poker-faced and godless: Expressive suppression and atheism.

Abstract

To make sense of an apparent discrepancy between atheists' muted self-reports of positive and negative emotions versus stereotyped perceptions of them as cold, angry, hostile, and unhappy, three Canadian studies explored a hypothesized link between atheism and expressive suppression (ES: modulating emotion by restricting its display). In Study 1 (N ϭ 1,059), atheists self-reported more ES compared to religious and agnostic/nonreligious groups, whereas cognitive reappraisal (CR: managing emotions by thinking differently about situations) scores did not differ. Study 2 (N ϭ 247) tested whether ES facilitates openness to an atheistic worldview by dampening the intensity of positive emotions, a known facilitator of religious/spiritual receptivity: chronic preference for ES (vs. CR) predicted increased endorsement of atheism-congruent postmortem beliefs when participants were instructed to suppress (but not when instructed to express) their emotions. Blind to religious identity, Study 3 participants (N ϭ 100) who watched silent video interviews perceived atheists to express less positive (but more negative) emotion compared to the religiously affiliated. Atheists were also judged to be less trustworthy and likable. By contributing to an observable grain of truth in stereotypic depictions of atheists' emotional demeanor, ES may exacerbate antiatheist prejudice even as it intensifies atheists' own convictions.