Ritual and Cognition

Abstract

Research into the mental processes that are involved with both the performance and the observance of rituals has a long history but it was not until the 1990s, with the resurgence of evolutionary and cognitive approaches to examining culture, that this developed into an active field of research. The distinctive feature of cognitive approaches to examining ritual is that they try to address how ritual performances interact and are shaped by the features of the human mind. The dominant topics of research in cognition and ritual have explored how rituals are linked to early‐developing overimitative tendencies; preexisting cognitive systems for avoiding hazards, encoding salient memories, and parsing action sequences; and how participation in harsh or traumatic rituals functions as a form of costly signaling of commitment to a group and encourages prosocial behavior from observers and participants.

Future Directions on BIPOC Youth Mental Health: The Importance of Cultural Rituals in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Finally, the distinction between doctrinal rituals that happen every week, calendrical rituals that happen every year, and rites of passage that often happen once in the lifespan suggest different mechanisms that can play a role in the development of mental health. Doctrinal rituals that are very frequent but lead to low levels of arousal are kept in semantic memory, while rites of passage that are less frequent but lead to high levels of arousal through their emotional impact can forge lasting episodic memories that help strengthen social bonds and provide meaning to developmental transitions (Kavanagh, 2018). Research on these mechanisms can provide insights for the design of clinical interventions and improvement of clinical theories.…”