14 DAY TRIAL // Negative emotions and anger can be managed more easily after saying a prayer, experts have found. The spiritual practice has been demonstrated to facilitate anger management in patients prone to outbursts of negative feelings.
Those who practice spirituality – regardless of form or religious content – must have already known this, but the study provides scientific data to support the correlation, PsychCentral reports.
Scientists in charge of the new investigation found that people who were insulted expressed less anger and aggression towards the one who did the insulting if they were asked to pray for another person in the meantime.
According to experts, divine intervention has little to do with this behavior. People have formed their own opinions over how a negative situation should be dealt with during prayer, and the sudden drop in aggression levels is owed to this knowledge.
“People often turn to prayer when they’re feeling negative emotions, including anger,” explains the coauthor of the new study, Ohio State University (OSU) social psychologist Dr. Brad Bushman.
“We found that prayer really can help people cope with their anger, probably by helping them change how they view the events that angered them and helping them take it less personally,” he adds.
The response people gave to an insulting situation after praying was not different between devout believers and those who were not particularly religious, or attended church very often.
It would appear therefore that the correlation the team discovered holds true regardless of the religious affiliation the study participants had, or of how many times they prayed in their private lives.
“Praying undid the effects of provocation on how people viewed the likelihood of these situations,” explains Dr. Sander Koole, an expert at the VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was also a part of the research.
“The effects we found in these experiments were quite large, which suggests that prayer may really be an effective way to calm anger and aggression,” Bushman argues.
“When people are confronting their own anger, they may want to consider the old advice of praying for one’s enemies. It may not benefit their enemies, but it may help them deal with the negative emotions,” concludes University of Michigan PhD student Ryan Bremner.
Details of the new research will appear in an upcoming print issue of the scientific journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The paper is already available online.