Are We So Attached To Rituals That We’re Not Prepared To Rethink Holiday Plans During COVID?
Why do so many people refuse to change their holiday plans, even when such changes to the traditional holiday celebrations could save lives? Research from Harvard and Berkeley shows that major holidays like these are highly ritualised, and that disrupting rituals evokes moral outrage. Psychologically, it makes sense: rituals, more than any other behaviour, represent a group’s cherished values. When they are disrupted, it feels like those values are under attack, a threat that is met with defiance and even anger. Hence the surge in travel and willingness to attend in-person gatherings: rituals are just too important to be disrupted, even if it’s to reduce the numbers of COVID cases.
Rituals are different from other types of behaviour because they require two components: a prescribed set of rigid, repetitive behaviours that have to occur whenever there is a celebration (such as always eating turkey at Christmas, participating in a Seder on Passover, and decorating eggs with family on Easter), and a sense of meaning associated with those behaviours. In one of the studies, a sample of U.S. citizens was asked to rate the degree 15 different holidays (including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve) meet these two properties of ritual: how rigid they are, and how much meaning the holiday carries.
The results showed that the more the holiday contained both of these features, the more participants were outraged when the holiday’s celebrations were altered. Moreover, the degree to which holidays included the rigid behaviours of ritual predicted outrage, above and beyond the meaning the holiday carries, indicating that it’s the altering of the physical rituals (and not just the degree of meaning) that triggers outrage.
Out of all holidays in the study, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, were rated the most ritualistic (in the case of New Year’s, this describes how uniform and rigid they are). This suggests that alterations to these holidays would be met with the greatest amount of resistance and a general refusal to follow restriction guidelines.
Take Thanksgiving, for example. It isn’t just about turkey and the fixings. It stands in people’s minds for all that is American—family values and national pride stemming all the way back to the anchoring of the Mayflower. As a result, mandated changes feel like a challenge to the very American values that the holiday has come to represent. The idea of not gathering for Thanksgiving, or altering the traditional rituals to which we’re accustomed, is shockingly irreverent to many millions of people.
In another study, Jewish participants were asked to imagine a series of changes to the traditional Passover Seder plate. Some of the alterations were major (changing many items on the plate) while other alterations were minor (changing only a few items on the plate). The researchers found that the major alterations produced comparable outrage as the minor alterations, indicating that even minor changes to rituals are not open to negotiation.
Simply put, our need for rituals is a matter of morals. While people feel comfortable applying cost-benefit analyses to things like changing the speed limit, moral values cannot be traded off for some other proposed benefit. For instance, in one of the studies, more than 90 percent of Jewish and Muslim participants reported that there was no amount of money that members of their religion would accept if it meant they could never practice the male circumcision ritual again, indicating individuals are insensitive to material gain when it comes to ritual practice.
Therefore, altering a ritual is simply not up for discussion. The more something is ritualistic—like Passover or Easter—the more it stands for the group’s most valued moral principles, the harder it is to alter the holiday celebrations without provoking deep outrage.
Even though lives are at stake—the lives of the very people we can’t imagine celebrating rituals without—many people continue to go forward with holiday traditions as they would in any other year. Since holiday rituals are deeply cherished, no amount of logical rationalisation can change people’s minds.Urging people to stay home and change their traditions for the reason that it will “save lives” or will “limit the spread of COVID” doesn’t seem to be effective enough. Perhaps we need to appeal to emotions, not facts. Recognising the moral value that people place on these rituals is a start. Then it’s about framing new holiday celebrations in a way that makes it seem that the meaning of the ritual isn’t being altered. With effective persuasive messaging, hopefully in the next few months we can return to our time-honoured traditions and we can be thankful that we are able to share them with our still-living families and loved ones.
Wherever you are in the world – stay safe, stay well and all the best for 2022!
REFERENCES:
* Stein DH, Schroeder J, Hobson NM, Gino F, Norton MI.
When alterations are violations: Moral outrage and punishment in response to (even minor) alterations to rituals.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2021 Jan 25. doi: 10.1037/pspi0000352. PMID: 33492153.
* Ovul Sezer, Michael I. Norton, Francesca Gino, and Kathleen D. Vohs
Family Rituals Improve the Holidays
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Volume 1, Number 4, 2016.
and say, “Hello Ellen.” Ellen would smile, wave back, and say, “How are you?” or “How’s life?” After engaging in this almost daily ritual for so long, Ellen is too embarrassed to tell her friendly neighbour that she actually doesn’t know what she’s called…she can’t remember her name. Major embarrassement – going on for almost three years now.
The hippocampus is key to our ability to take two things that are not associated in our minds and put them together. When you meet someone whose name and face aren’t previously associated in your mind, your hippocampus plays an important role in putting these things together into a single memory. That gives you the ability to know how to address the person.
When you meet someone, you may be focused on impressing the person with your skill and expertise rather than learning more about them. You introduce yourselves and shake hands (or fist bump in the current Corona climate). But when you pass the person again at the event, why do you draw a blank?
So after you hear someone’s name, repeat it back. You could say, “Nice to meet you, Bill,” then give their name (first or last name) some meaning to help you attach their name and face to each other. Maybe Bill has a nose or mouth that looks like a duck’s bill… (Just don’t call him duck-face to his face….!) Grand Master Kevin Horsley recommends finding significance in a person’s name within a 20-second time frame after hearing it. Doing something creative and connecting that unusual image to the face can serve as a reminder for the next time you get together.
There are both passive and active forms of physical rest.
Next up is mental rest—who doesn’t need some of that with all of the stress we have in our lives and with the covid pandemic! Mental fatigue can result from a variety of things including negative self-talk, over-thinking, anxious what-if thinking, being stuck in the past, and judgements.
One way to ease the mental load is through use of good time management skills. Remember to take into account not only the amount of time the task takes, but the emotional load of the task as well. There are things that we do that may not take that much time, but we will need time before or after the event due to the strain on our minds or emotions. For example, spending 1 hour folding the washing is different from spending 1 hour caring for an ill family member. The effective time for the family member activity might be
The first step in getting more emotional rest is being mindful of your environment. Emotions are contagious! Are you around people who complain all the time or are judgmental? As best you can, modify these environments by removing unnecessary negativity and coping ahead for when you have to be in stressful situations.
Another thing that is helpful in reducing the amount of (social) comparisons that you do. You probably wouldn’t be surprised that many of us engage in emotionally draining comparisons several times a day. Are you scrolling through social media, comparing your looks, your skills, and your furniture choices to those you see on Facebook and Instagram? Stop it, it’s creating more of a deficit for you.
Spirituality is broad. It can include organised religious practices, but spiritual rest can simply be about connecting with something greater than yourself. It could include prayer or a spiritual practice. But basically anything that gives you a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose and feeling connected to that ‘something bigger’ means you’re on the right track.
But do remember that your social circles – be it a club, a group of friends or a team sport – help to deepen relationships and make you feel more connected. People are dynamic and it’s important to embrace all of your social needs. Whatever you’re into, there is a group of people who like the same thing—and that can feed your social rest need too.
You want to think in terms of each of your 5 senses. If you live in a big city, it can be brutally loud, assault you with a myriad of smells from delicious to disgusting, cram you in like sardines during a bus ride, and always have something to look at between the people, cars, buildings, and randomness on every corner. Needless to say, sensory overload can occur!
If you’ve ever felt like you’re just out of good ideas, you’ve experienced being creatively drained. Most people experience it as being uninspired or feeling blocked from your creative juices. And if you’ve been there, you know that pushing through doesn’t always work.
Mindfulness may indeed have psychological benefits. Earlier this year, a synthesis of randomised controlled trials revealed that mindfulness-based interventions had small to moderate benefits for a number of health outcomes, including stress, anxiety and depression. That said, the effects of mindfulness were smaller and less consistent when compared with those of other therapies, and some effects appeared to fade months after the intervention. Taken together, the results suggest that mindfulness-based interventions may be better than nothing for some outcomes but that more research is needed to compare mindfulness with other therapies.
To be clear, paying attention is important when learning a new skill. In a 2019 study, measures of cognitive ability that tapped the capacity to focus attention predicted novice pianists’ ability to learn and play “Happy Birthday to You.”
More recently (2013), psychologist Yannick Balk and his colleagues had golfers try different interventions designed to lessen the effects of performance pressure. The researchers induced performance pressure by videotaping the participants, telling them that their score sheets would be posted publicly at the clubhouse and incentivising strong performance with coupons to the golf shop.
Nevertheless, the important message from this research is that focusing too carefully on the execution of well-practiced motor sequences can cause mistakes. Of course, we should not resign to go through life on autopilot, missing opportunities to make deeper
Hints that grey hairs could spontaneously regain colour have existed as isolated case studies within the scientific literature for decades. In one 1972 paper, the dermatologist Stanley Comaish reported an encounter with a 38-year-old man who had what he described as a “most unusual feature.” Although the vast majority of the individual’s hairs were either all black or all white, three strands were light near the ends but dark near the roots. This signaled a reversal in the normal greying process, which begins at the root.
While discussing these ideas with his partner, Picard mentioned something in passing: if one could find a hair that was only partially grey—and then calculate how fast that hair was growing—it might be possible to pinpoint the period in which the hair began aging and thus ask the question of what happened in the individual’s life to trigger this change. He was thinking out loud…but unexpectedly, his wife turned to him and said she had seen such two-coloured hairs on her head. She went to the bathroom, plucked a couple of her own greying hairs—that’s when and how the project started!
The team also investigated the association between hair greying and psychological stress because prior research hinted that such factors may accelerate the hair’s aging process. Anecdotes of such a connection are also visible throughout history: according to legend, the hair of Marie Antoinette, the 18th-century queen of France, turned white overnight just before her execution at the guillotine.
For now, the next step is to look more carefully at the link between stress and greying. Picard and colleagues are currently putting together a grant to conduct another study that would examine changes in hair and stress levels prospectively—which means tracking participants over a specified period of time rather than asking them to recall life events from the past.
It’s no wonder that nearly 60 percent of psychiatric patients want to discuss spirituality in the context of their treatment. Yet psychiatrists and doctors rarely provide such an opportunity. Since Sigmund Freud’s characterisation of religion as a “mass-delusion” nearly 100 years ago, mental health professionals and scientists have eschewed the spiritual realm. Current efforts to flatten the COVID-19 mental health curve have been almost entirely secular. The American Psychological Association’s extensive set of consumer resources makes no mention of spirituality. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s only spiritual recommendation is to “connect with your community- or faith-based organisations.” Of more than 90,000 active projects presently funded by all 27 institutes and centers within the National Institutes of Health, fewer than 20 mention spirituality anywhere in the abstract, and only one project contains this term in its title. Needless to say, a lack of funding for research on spirituality hamstrings clinical innovation and dissemination.
Compassion fatigue was first described in emergency department nurses and oncology nurses. Nurses may constantly witness pain, decline, and death, often without being able to save patients no matter how much of themselves they put into their work. Compassion fatigue has also been documented in child protection workers and mental healthcare providers.
Having just one or two of these symptoms could be a fluke. But if you’re experiencing a few of these, chances are good that you’re experiencing compassion fatigue.
You’ve been giving compassion to your patients or your family or total strangers. But have you been giving any to yourself? Do you forgive yourself for mistakes or cut yourself some slack when you need a break? Do you say to yourself the comforting things that you would say to your best friend? Self-compassion is an important ingredient in loosening up compassion fatigue.
Tracey’s predicament is not uncommon. According to one of the most comprehensive assessments of neurology clinics to date, roughly a third of patients have neurological symptoms that are deemed to be either partially or entirely unexplained. These may include tremour, seizures, blindness, deafness, pain, paralysis and coma and can parallel those of almost any neurological disease. In some patients, such complications can persist for years or even decades; some people require wheelchairs or cannot get out of bed. Although women are more often diagnosed than men, such seemingly inexplicable illness can be found in anyone and across any life span.
Hysteria had its heyday in the 19th century, when it moved from the womb to the brain. Among several physicians who studied it was Jean-Martin Charcot, regarded by many as the “father of neurology.” At the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, he painstakingly detailed the symptoms of patients with hysteria and, after they died, conducted autopsies on their brains. Although Charcot was unable to identify any structural aberrations in those subjects, he was convinced that the impairments he saw were associated with unobservable, fluctuating changes in the brain, which he called “dynamic or functional lesions.”
In recent years FND has gone from a diagnosis of exclusion—a label doctors reserved for patients whose conditions defied all other explanations—to one made after identifying distinct signs and symptoms. These resemble those of other neurological disorders but possess identifiable differences. One example is Hoover’s sign, in which weakness in a limb is temporarily corrected when the patient’s attention is directed elsewhere. Another is tremour entrainment: when patients with a functional tremour in one arm are asked to start shaking the other at a regular rhythm, the affected hand will start to shake with the same rhythm as the other. This effect does not occur in people with neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Clear signs of functional seizures include tightly shut eyes, rapid breathing and shaking that lasts for several minutes—features rarely seen during epileptic attacks.
A year after landing in the hospital because of her FND, Tracey was referred to a psychologist. At first, she did not think she needed to be there—her symptoms had been improving with physiotherapy. After several sessions of psychotherapy, however, she made a shocking discovery: she had blocked the memory of certain key events in her childhood. Among those forgotten experiences were years of physical abuse at the hands of a family friend.
Consider someone who falls and badly sprains a leg, resulting in a temporary loss of mobility in that limb. In most people, the brain’s predictions about the injured leg’s ability to move would get updated once mobility returns. This person, however, has a tendency toward mild anxiety that amplifies the levels of subconscious attention they pay to their body and has been sensitive to health events since the sudden death of a parent. These predisposing factors magnify the sensations associated with injury; in consequence, the internal model of the immobile leg persists even after the limb regains its function, leading to functional paralysis. (In some ways, this is the opposite of what happens in people who experience phantom limb syndrome. Those people are unable to update the prediction error that occurs when an expected sensation in a missing limb is not met with actual sensory feedback.)
After a few months Troup decided to stop going to physiotherapy. At the time the entire right side of her body was barely functioning, and she was using a wheelchair for mobility. After being admitted to the hospital several more times for strokelike attacks, however, Troup met Stone’s team and was provided with FND-tailored care. It involved a form of physiotherapy that employs techniques such as distraction to shift the spotlight of attention away from the affected limbs while engaging in exercises to help restore normal control.
The research suggests that whatever you think the other person wants, you may well be wrong. The answer seems to be to leave at the first time it seems appropriate, because it’s better to be left wanting more than less.
In the second experiment, held in the lab, the researchers split 252 participants into pairs of strangers and instructed them to talk about whatever they liked for anywhere from one to 45 minutes. Afterward the team asked the subjects when they would have liked the conversation to have ended and to guess about their partner’s answer to the same question.
That people fail so completely in judging when a conversation partner wishes to wrap things up is quite astounding. Conversations are normally an elegant expression of mutual coordination. And yet it all falls apart at the end because we just can’t figure out when to stop. This puzzle is probably one reason why people like to have talks over coffee, drinks or a meal, because the empty coffee cup or asking for the bill gives us an excuse which is a critical conversation-ending crutch.
While this cannot be determined in the countless exchanges of everyday life, scientists could feasibly design an experiment in which talks either end at precisely the point when a participant first wants to stop or continue for some point beyond. Do those whose conversations end just when they want them to actually end up with better conversations than those that last longer?
The burgeoning science of conversation obviously needs more rigorous research, but it also needs causal experiments to test strategies that might help us navigate the important and pervasive challenges of conversation. It tickles me that we can put rovers on Mars, have amazing scientific breakthroughs and yet we’re just beginning to rigorously understand how we, as people, talk to each other!!
The type of lateralisation most familiar to people is undoubtedly handedness. This has been studied in animals by looking at things like which hand monkeys use to grab something, which paw dogs use to knock food out of a container, and so on. But what do you do when the animal you’re studying doesn’t have hands (or paws)? How do you study lateralisation in an animal like a dolphin?
This is where it gets tricky. When comparing across animals, we have to take account of the fact that body plans and typical ways of moving may be different. For example, if the animal walks upright (like humans and birds) the long axis of its body is vertical, but if it walks on all fours, the long axis of its body is horizontal. This means that “turning” can involve very different types of movements. For an animal on all fours, turning involves crunching the long axis of its body to one side or the other. For an animal on two legs, turning involves spinning around the long axis of its body, which is kept straight. And for an animal like a dolphin who moves in three-dimensional space, either type of turning is possible.
When scientists set out to study lateralisation in dolphins, they were careful to separate these two different types of turning. But they ran into another problem when researchers kept disagreeing about what counts as a spin “to the right” (or left). After a lot of discussion (and sometimes argument), they realised that they had stumbled upon a weird quirk of human perception. Apparently, humans interpret the direction of spinning in opposite ways depending on the orientation of the animal.
The system they came up with was actually inspired by the “right-hand rule” of electromagnetism that many of us learned in school physics lessons. According to that rule, if you point your right thumb in the direction in which an electrical current flows through a wire, the curve of your fingers shows you the direction of the magnetic field flowing around that wire. The dolpihn researchers adopted the general outline of this schematic model to create the Right-Fingered Spin (RiFS) versus Left-Fingered Spin (LeFS) coding system. In this system, when a coder’s outstretched thumb is oriented along the animal’s long axis, pointed toward its head, the curled fingers of the relevant hand describe the direction of rotation. This allowed us to quickly and unambiguously code spinning/turning behaviours no matter the animal’s orientation or direction of movement.
People often think that scientific progress happens when we learn something new that we didn’t know before. But another kind of scientific progress happens when we realise that there is a problem with the way we’ve been looking at things all along. In those cases, figuring out a different way of looking can lead to seeing things more clearly. And as science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once pointed out, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’”
The Danish believe in hygge (pronounced “hoo-gah”), which loosely translates to “coziness” and sounds to me a lot like ‘hug’! The word originated from an Old Norwegian word meaning “well-being,” and it captures all that is cozy, warm, and enjoyable. Curling up under a soft blanket while holding a warm mug of cocoa is hygge. Chatting with friends and family around a fire (ohhh I wish that that were possible at the moment….) is hygge. And simply enjoying the glow of a candle is hygge.
On the subject of being with the environment, we’ll ‘travel’ now eastwards to Japan, to take a dip in the woods. Not an actual swim, but rather, an immersion in nature called “shinrin-yoku,” loosely translated to “forest bathing.”
Who doesn’t enjoy a good belly laugh? But have you ever done it on purpose? The idea of (Indian) laughter yoga is that we don’t have to wait for something funny to happen in order to laugh. Instead, laughter can and should be practiced for its own sake.
Dopamine production is essential for growth. But there are so many misconceptions about the role of dopamine in cognition and behaviour. Dopamine is often labelled the “feel-good molecule,” but this is a gross mischaracterisation of this neurotransmitter. As personality neuroscientist Colin DeYoung notes, dopamine is actually the “neuromodulator of exploration.” Dopamine’s primary role is to make us want things, but not necessarily like things. We get the biggest rush of dopamine coursing through our brains at the possibility of reward, but this rush is no guarantee that we’ll actually like or even enjoy the thing once we get it. Dopamine is a huge energising force in our lives, driving our motivation to explore and facilitating the cognitive and behavioural processes that allow us to extract the most delights from the unknown.
How active is your nerdy dopamine pathway?