BACKGROUND Various rituals have been shown to have both psychologic as well as physical effects. However, many rituals have multiple components that can account for such effects. Few studies have distinguished between the effects of ritual and those related specifically to religious content and teachings. OBJECTIVES The present study investigated the acute effects of the ritual of reciting th...

Psychology Psi (Public Domain) Since the dawn of civilization and the establishment of the earliest religions and spiritual beliefs, various priests, shamans and spiritual leaders were responsible for the mental wellbeing of their people. From shamen to Jewish Qabbalists, curing the mind was a huge part of the spiritual path, even if treatment was couched in magic and mystery, using rituals to ...

Objective: To investigate spatial recognition abilities and working memory in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) patients grouped according to their primary symptom dimensions. Memory has always occupied a central position in OCD research, mainly because of the notion that faulty memory processes could mediate many of the repetitive compulsive rituals. However, the role of different memory sys...

Achieving goals often requires the completion of sequential actions, such as finishing a series of assignments to pass a class. In the course of pursuing such goals, people can decide how closely to follow their personal standards for each action. We propose that actions at the beginning and end of a sequence appear more diagnostic of the pursuer's personal standards than do actions in the midd...

Mary Douglas argues that, ‘There are some things we cannot experience without ritual.’ Ex-prisoner reintegration may be one of them. The punishment process involves an inordinate amount of ritual behavior, from the drama of the courtroom to the elaborate de-individuation processes involved in institutionalization. Durkheim argues that these rituals serve a distinct purpose for society: engender...

The representation of the practice of sati, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyre, has garnered interest for long from postcolonial and feminist discourses among others. While advocates of Western modernity perceive sati as a murderous ritual, the proponents of orthodox Hinduism, on the contrary, claim sati to be a courageous cult of “wifely devotion”. In both bigoted beliefs...

nature displays profound preference for certain specific ratios to design her life-forms. these are geometric relationships that are transcendent and originated from sacred geometry. the view that geometry had a ritual origin is a part of a wider view that civilization itself had a ritual origin, and therefore the history of utilization of sacred geometry by man goes back to many centuries ago....

While anthropological studies in non-Western societies show how funerals protect the community from the threat of death, sociological studies of British funerals have so far focused on meanings for the private family. The article reports on results from a Mass Observation directive - the first British study to focus specifically on the entire funeral congregation - and shows how attendees exper...

The archaeology of animal sacrifice has attracted considerable attention, although discussions on the meanings and social effects of the practice in different contexts are rather under-developed. In the Aegean, classical antiquity has provided abundant literary, zooarchaeological and iconographic evidence (and has inspired some excellent studies) but it has also overshadowed discussion on sacri...