We are excited to announce that Using Everyday Prayer to Test Functions of Gratitude in the Context of Religion (Van Cappellen, Bernal, & Algoe) has been accepted for publication in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin!

This study introduces a novel method for capturing the content of daily, naturalistic prayer: participants audio-recorded their prayers over two weeks, producing more than 1,100 spoken prayers that were later transcribed and analyzed. To quantify expressions of gratitude within these prayers, the team combined dictionary-based linguistic analysis (using LIWC) with AI-assisted text coding (GPT-4), allowing for both precise word-level measurement and deeper, context-sensitive interpretation of gratitude language. The study found that expressions of gratitude to God were common in daily prayers and that on days when individuals expressed more gratitude than usual, they also reported feeling closer to God and experiencing more positive spontaneous thoughts about prayer.

We’re proud that the Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center (IBRC) helped make this project possible by supporting participant recruitment. Check out the pre print of this paper here!