Atheism is associated with the habitual restriction of emotional displays, according to new research published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The findings have implications for anti-atheist prejudice as well as why some individuals are drawn toward an atheistic worldview.
“Belief or disbelief in the Unseen is often regarded as the foundation of people’s worldviews, and anger, pity, and the like are often directed at those whose worldviews don’t match our own. This new research points to a profound irony — that belief and disbelief themselves are shaped, in part, by what we do with our emotions,” said Christopher T. Burris, the author of the new study and professor of psychology at St. Jerome’s University.
“This line of research began with a chance discovery while examining demographic data over a decade ago. It evolved into a 2011 paper that showed that atheists reported less intense positive and negative emotions relative to religious believers. The new paper tackles the ‘Why?’ and ‘So what?’ follow-up questions,” the researcher explained.
Burris first surveyed 1,059 undergraduate psychology students regarding their religious beliefs and had them complete an assessment of their emotion regulation tendencies. About half of the participants identified as Christian, while 30% identified as agnostic or nonreligious. Fifteen percent identified as atheist. The remainder identified as Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or other.
Compared to religiously affiliated individuals and agnostic/nonreligious individuals, Burris found that self-identified atheists were more likely to report engaging in emotional suppression. In other words, atheists were more likely to agree with statements such as “When I am feeling positive emotions, I am careful not to express them.”
However, there was no difference between atheists and other participants when it came to the use of cognitive reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy. (“I control my emotions by changing the way I think about the situation I’m in.”)
To better understand why atheism is linked to emotional suppression, Burris conducted an experiment with 247 undergraduates, which found that participants who were instructed to conceal their emotions were less confident in life after death compared to those instructed to feel free to express their emotions. But this was only true among those who preferred using suppression over reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy.
In a second experiment, 8 atheist and 8 religiously affiliated undergraduates were recorded as they described a recent experience that made them feel frustrated or annoyed and a recent experience that made them feel happy or joyful. A sample of 100 undergraduates then watched the videos with the sound off and rated each speaker’s emotional expressiveness, trustworthiness, and likability. The participants who watched the videos were unaware of each speaker’s affiliation.
Burris found that the atheists were seen as less emotionally expressive on average compared to the religiously affiliated individuals, especially when it came to displays of positive emotion.
“Compared to non-atheists (which includes agnostics and the nonreligious as well as believers), atheists are not more likely to manage their emotions by thinking differently about situations. Atheists are more likely to resist expressing their emotions, however, and people apparently notice this even if they don’t know someone is an atheist,” he told PsyPost.
“Why the link? Past research has shown that spiritual experience has been linked to positive emotions, which restricted expression is especially likely to squash. In the absence of spiritual experience fueled by positive emotion, an atheistic worldview may seem more compelling. In other words, it looks like expressive suppression drives atheism, rather than vice versa.”
“A pokerface can be useful in poker. In everyday situations, however, people who are hard to read can be seen as untrustworthy because they’re basically unpredictable. This is a problem in that atheists as a group are already targets of prejudice because they are judged to be untrustworthy. Atheists’ greater reliance on expressive suppression may reduce their chances of breaking down such prejudice through positive one-to-one interactions with non-atheists,” Burris explained.
Like all research, the study includes some limitations.
“The usual caveats apply: The research wasn’t based on a random sample of the world, and the documented group differences don’t necessarily capture the experience of any single individual,” Burris said.
“A more substantive issue is that people in the big sample were surveyed at a single point in time, mostly in emerging adulthood. Neither worldviews nor emotion regulation strategies can be expected to remain stable over time, however. Thus, a natural follow-up study would involve tracking changes in both to see if shifts in expressive suppression predict fluctuations in the occurrence of experiences that people label ‘spiritual,’ as well as corresponding shifts in their worldviews.”
The study was titled: “Poker-faced and godless: Expressive suppression and atheism“.
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