Category Archives: Publications

New Publication in the Journal of Positive Psychology by BABLab Post-Doc Megan Edwards!

Lab Members, Publications

We are proud to announce a new publication by BABLab Post-Doctoral Associate, Megan Edwards!

Edwards, M. E., Rose, H., Wang, I., King, L. A. (2026). The role of hope in supporting purpose following childhood adversity. The Journal of Positive Psychology. (in press)

In this paper, Megan and her team present evidence to suggest that, for those who were subjected to adverse experiences in childhood, hope is associated with greater levels of purpose. Purpose, or the feeling that one’s life has clear goals and direction, is one of the three core components of a meaningful life, alongside coherence (being able to make sense of one’s life) and significance (feeling that life matters). The findings presented in this paper suggest that the ability to keep a hopeful outlook on life may act as a protective factor against the harm of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

Congratulations to Megan and her co-authors!

New Publication in Cognition and Emotion: How Beliefs About Positive Emotional Expressions Differ by Social Class

Lab Members, Publications

We are proud to announce a new publication by BABLab Post-Doctoral Associate, Kunalan Manokara!

Ye*, Z., Manokara*, K., Lamba, N., Sauter, D., & Sun, R. (2026). Beliefs about others’ positive emotional expressions: how they diverge by target social class, and why it matters. Cognition and Emotion, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2026.2626442

In this paper, Kunalan and his team (including his Master’s student, whom he shared first authorship* with!) investigated beliefs about others’ emotional expressions in relation to targets’ social class. They focused on two types of positive emotions: self-oriented (e.g. pride) and other-oriented (e.g. gratitude).

Across samples from four societies (UK, India, UAE, and the US), the authors found a strikingly consistent pattern of findings. While higher-class targets were believed as more likely to express self- oriented positive emotions (e.g., pride), lower-class targets were instead more likely thought to express other-oriented positive emotions (e.g., gratitude).

In follow-up experiments evaluating the social consequences of these emotion stereotypes, the authors demonstrated that people were less willing to associate with and work in teams with targets whose emotional expressions misaligned with their expectations (e.g., lower class people who show their pride, or higher class people who communicate their gratitude).

Taken together, these findings highlight the consistency of class-based emotion stereotypes and the behavioral intentions that stem from such beliefs.

This work was featured in the APS Presidential Roundtable 2025, where Kunalan was invited to share his findings. Congratulations!

New Publication: Spirituality beyond religion: Development of 9-item and 27-item multidimensional measures of spiritual yearning.

Publications

We’re happy to announce a new publication from our very own Dr.Patty Van Cappellen!

Wilt, J. A., Van Tongeren, D. R., Van Cappellen, P., & Exline, J. J. (in press). Spirituality beyond religion: Development of 9-item and 27-item multidimensional measures of spiritual yearning. Journal of Personality Assessment.

“In this paper, we developed a new scale to assess spiritual yearning. Spiritual yearning captures a motivational state of longing: a perceived insufficiency and desire for meaning, connection, or transcendence.”

The 9 Things Nonreligious People Yearn For

The study looked at over 1,500 nonreligious adults and found that this “yearning” isn’t just one vague feeling. It actually breaks down into nine specific categories:

  1. Moral Guidance

  2. Divine Relationship

  3. Afterlife Beliefs

  4. Communal Belonging

  5. Transcendent Interconnectedness

  6. Inner Peace

  7. Spiritual Experiences

  8. Authentic Self-Discovery

  9. Meaningful Legacy

Why This Matters

Dr. Van Cappellen, alongside other researchers, created two new scales (a short 9-item version and a detailed 27-item version) to help psychologists measure these feelings.

They found that people with high “Spiritual Yearning” scores often struggle with existential questions or “spiritual struggles.”  By identifying these yearnings, we can better understand how nonreligious people find meaning, cope with stress, and navigate their inner lives.

New Publication In Press: Studying Gratitude in Everyday Prayer

Lab Members, Publications

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!

New Publications from Lab Members

Lab Members, Publications

Happy New Year & Happy Lunar New Year! We are welcoming the Spring 2025 semester with exciting new publications on emotion from our BABLab members.

Dr. Megan Edwards, BABLab post-doctoral fellow, recently celebrated two publications on hope and awe, currently in-press at Emotion and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin respectively.

  • Edwards, M. E., Booker, J. A., Cook, K., Gan, Y., Miao, M., & King, L. A. (in press). Hope as a meaningful emotion: Hope, positive affect, and meaning in life. Emotion. Pre-print.
  • Edwards, M. E., Mendenhall, K., Sanders, C., & King, L. A. (in press). Small but still significant: Awe and the Self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Pre-print.

Cheryl Tan, BABLab co-lab manager, celebrated a paper on joy last summer, currently published online at The Journal of Positive Psychology.

We look forward to sharing more of the work that our BABLab members have been working hard on!

New Publication!

Publications

We’re happy to announce a new publication from the lab on the embodiment of prayer postures in three world religions!

Van Cappellen, P., Edwards, M.E., Kamble, S.V., Yildiz, M., Ladd, K.L. (2024). Kneel, stand, prostrate: The psychology of prayer postures in three world religions. PLoS ONE, 19(8): e0306924. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306924

Background:
Most people practice a religion, often multiple times daily. Among the most visible aspects of these practices are body postures, which according to embodiment theories, likely shape the psychological experience of religion.

Objective:
In a preregistered study, we test this idea among Christians, Muslims, and Hindus in the United States, Turkey, and India (N = 2,458).

Method:
In a repeated-measures experimental design, participants imagined praying in various typical postures, then reported their affective experiences, perceived relationship with deity, and prayer content for each posture.

Results & Conclusion:
Compared to downward and constrictive postures, expansive and upward postures led to more positive emotions, dominance, and praise-focused prayers, yet fewer introspective or intercessory prayers. Interestingly, these effects varied based on religious context (e.g., many Hindus found upward and expansive postures offensive, causing no positive affect). We further explored whether these effects varied based on posture familiarity, religiosity, interoceptive sensibility, and personality traits. This research provides unique data on embodied processes shaping affect and cognition in religious practices.

 

New Publication by Former BABLab Research Assistant!

Lab Members, Publications

Based on her honors thesis with advisor Dr. Van Cappellen during her undergraduate years at Duke University, Gwyn Reece has published her first paper!

Reece, G. A., Van Tongeren, D. R., & Van Cappellen, P. (In press). Eternal outgroups: Afterlife beliefs predict prejudice. Personality and Individual Differences, 214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112352

Background

Both religious and nonreligious people hold beliefs about what happens after death. The eternal criteria embedded in afterlife beliefs – for example, what happens for the morally good versus the morally bad — may implicate intergroup attitudes and behavior in the present.

Objective

The set of 4 studies aimed to investigate whether and how afterlife beliefs have direct implications for real-life intergroup prejudice.

Results

In Study 1, religious afterlife beliefs were associated with more prejudice towards nonreligious people. In extension, Study 2 used nationally representative archival data and found that among religious people, specific beliefs in hell and heaven mediated the association between religiosity and prejudice towards atheists. In Study 3, religious afterlife beliefs continued to be associated with prejudice towards value-threatening outgroup members, even when controlling for religiosity. This was shown in a specific context in Study 4: Christians with exclusionary views of heaven expressed more prejudice towards atheists than those with inclusionary views.

Conclusion

Together, these studies show that both religious and secular afterlife beliefs relate to prejudice towards value-incongruent outgroup members, consistent with the group exclusionary hypothesis. Specific religious afterlife beliefs, such as hell or heaven, explain some of the association between religiosity and prejudice against ideologically dissimilar groups.

New publication!

Publications

New publication stemming from our grant-funded project on the scientific study of gratitude to god!

Van Cappellen, P., Clapp, A., & Algoe, S. (in press). God of the good gaps: Prevalence, eliciting situations, and demonstrations of gratitude to god as compared to interpersonal gratitude. Journal of Positive Psychology.

Abstract:

Gratitude for another person’s actions has received exponential attention from the scientific community for its many benefits. Yet, this research is virtually silent on one key target of gratitude – god – despite billions of people believing in a personal, intervening, and benevolent god. In a large multi–method study, we sampled U.S. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians (N=1270). First, we document the prevalence of spontaneous mentions of god as the target of a gratitude expression following a personal success. Only 16% of our religious participants did mention god but priming god increased this number to 29%. Second, we documented a wider array of eliciting situations of gratitude to god (GTG) compared to gratitude to another person (GTO) and particularly for broad good things in life that don’t have a clear agent. Finally, we documented ways that GTG vs. GTO is demonstrated, suggesting that GTG sustains religious practice and builds morality.

New Publication!: Bodily Feedback: Expansive and Upward Posture Facilitates the Experience of Positive Affect

Publications

Van Cappellen, P., Ladd, K. L., Cassidy, S., Edwards, M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (in press). Bodily Feedback: Expansive and Upward Posture Facilitates the Experience of Positive Affect. Cognition and Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2022.2106945

 

Background

Most emotion theories recognise the importance of the body in expressing and constructing emotions.

 

Objective

Focusing beyond the face, the present research adds needed empirical data on the effect of static full body postures on positive/negative affect. In Studies 1 (N = 110) and 2 (N = 79), using a bodily feedback paradigm, we manipulated postures to test causal effects on affective and physiological responses to emotionally ambiguous music.

 

Results

Across both studies among U.S. participants, we find the strongest support for an effect of bodily postures that are expansive and oriented upward on positive affect. In addition, an expansive and upward pose also led to greater cardiac vagal reactivity but these changes in parasympathetic activity were not related to affective changes (Study 2).

 

Conclusion

In line with embodied theories, these results provide additional support for the role of postural input in constructing affect. Discussion highlights the relevance of these findings for the study of religious practices during which the postures studied are often adopted.

New Publication: Shades of Expansiveness: Postural Expression of Dominance, High-Arousal Positive Affect, and Warmth.

Publications

Van Cappellen, P., Edwards, M. E., Shiota, M. N. (in press). Shades of expansiveness: Postural expression of dominance, high-arousal positive affect, and warmth. Emotion. Pre-print.

 

Background

In addition to the face, bodily posture plays an important role in communicating affective states. Postural expansion – how much space the body takes – has been much studied as expressing and signaling dominance and pride. 

 

Objective

The present research aimed to expand research on the range of affect dimensions and affect-laden personality characteristics that are expressed via expansiveness, investigating specific forms of expansiveness and their interactions with other postural elements (e.g., arm position). Using an innovative expression-production method, Study 1 (N = 146) characterized full-body expressions of dominance, joy, hope, and awe, while Studies 2-3 (Ns = 352, 183) expanded on this by asking participants to rate photos of posed mannequins on a variety of affective dimensions.

 

Results

Study 1 results indicated joy is communicated most expansively and suggested a signature arm position for most feelings. Studies 2-3 revealed that other postural features interact with expansiveness to signal dominance (arms akimbo, head raised, stability), as distinct from high arousal positive affect (arms high up, head raised), and warmth (arms high up, head raised, instability). 

 

Conclusion

Together, this research adds needed data on full-body expressions of positive affect states and provides systematic analysis of different affective messages and varieties of postural expansiveness.