A new paper by Patty Van Cappellen and former BABLab members Cai Liu and Amanda Bernal has been accepted for publication in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations:

Van Cappellen, P., Bernal, A. M., & Liu, C. (2026). Disentangling religiosity: Specific religious perspectives reduce intergroup bias. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 13684302261469469. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302261469469

Across four studies involving more than 2,300 participants in the United States, the researchers examined how specific dimensions of religiosity influence attitudes and behaviors toward social groups. The findings showed that two religious perspectives, a benevolent image of God and a more liberal religious ideology, were associated with lower levels of intergroup bias. Viewing God as loving, forgiving, and compassionate was associated with more favorable judgments and greater support for groups whose values may differ from traditional religious beliefs. Similarly, religious perspectives emphasizing openness, pluralism, and engagement with different viewpoints were linked to greater fairness across group boundaries.

Importantly, the reduction in bias resulted from increased support for marginalized groups rather than decreased support for other groups. The findings demonstrate the importance of viewing religiosity as a multidimensional concept and highlight how certain religious perspectives may encourage inclusion, compassion, and bridge-building across differences.

The research was recently featured by Duke University’s Social Science Research Institute in the article “How Religious Perspectives Can Reduce Bias.” See the SSRI article here!

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!

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!

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!

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.

• Tan, C. S. & Titova, L. (2025). Enjoying the moment of joy: Culture and self during emotional experience. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 20(3), 498-509. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2387338. [Free Eprint Here]

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

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.