BABLab at SPSP 2025!

Events, Lab Members

Happy Spring! With new blossoms emerging at the turn of the season, we’d like to celebrate our BABLab members in this season of growth.

Last month, BABLab attended the 2025 SPSP Annual Convention in Denver, featuring: data blitz talk by post-doctoral fellow Dr. Megan Edwards, and an array of poster presentations by lab managers Jenna Faith McClear, Cheryl Tan, and senior undergraduate RA Rohan Gupta!

Dr. Megan Edwards at the Existential Psychology Pre-Conference

Cheryl Tan, Rohan Gupta at the Emotion Pre-Conference 

Jenna Faith McClear at the Religion & Spirituality Pre-Conference

The BABLab Team at SPSP 2025!

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!

BABLab Receives Grant Funding to Investigate the Science of Empathy!

Grants

Congratulations to Dr. Van Cappellen for being awarded with grant funding from the Templeton Religion Trust! Dr. Van Cappellen serves as Principal Investigator, with BABLab post-doctoral fellow Dr. Kunalan Manokara as Co-Investigator, on this grant ($259,986) titled “The Science of Empathy: A Scoping Review”, a two-year project from November 2024 to 2026.

This project will evaluate the current state of the field on empathy research, guided by the following five strands:

  1. How is empathy defined and measured?
  2. What are the societal impacts of empathy?
  3. How is empathy situated re: related constructs?
  4. What is the role of religion in promoting empathy?
  5. How may empathy have a role in covenantal plurism?

Why empathy? Empathy is widely recognized by practitioners as essential for fostering peaceful relationships as it promotes interpersonal cooperation and intergroup peace. In an increasingly polarized world where division is exacerbated by ideological differences, cultivating empathy for different perspectives is crucial. This scoping review serves to organize conceptualizations of empathy, as well as related constructs such as compassion and love, in order to: integrate and evaluate new knowledge and robustness; identify gaps in the field; and suggest  new lines of empirical research.

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.

 

Summer Research Highlights: RA Presentations

Events, Lab Members

This Summer, we mentored two rising sophomores from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)! Over the eight week program, Rachel and Jasmine worked on the BABLab’s latest study on compassion — from literature review, survey creation, to data cleaning and results presentation. In culmination of their time in the lab, both RAs created and presented individual posters at the Duke Summer Research Showcase last Friday.

Congratulations to Jasmine (left) and Rachel (right) on their first research poster presentation!

 

BABLab Receives Grant Funding to Investigate Virtual Worship & Flourishing!

Grants

Congratulations to Dr. Van Cappellen for being awarded with grant funding from the Templeton World Charity! Dr. Van Cappellen serves as Principal Investigator on this grant ($499,489) titled “Worship 2.0: Testing the benefits and challenges of virtual
worship participation for flourishing”, a three-year project beginning in September 2024 to August 2027.

This project seeks to examine the flourishing-related benefits and challenges of worship modes in evangelical Protestant Christians and Black Protestant Christians churches, for whom virtual worship is practiced more frequently. Flourishing will be assessed at both the personal and spiritual levels: through psychological well-being and subjective happiness, and felt presence of God and spiritual well-being.

Through qualitative, quantitative, and experimental data, we address three research questions:

  1. Does virtual worship participation bring the same benefits for flourishing as in-person worship?
  2. Are the mechanisms through which worship is thought to affect flourishing still activated by virtual worship?
  3. What factors optimize the experience of virtual worship?

This project will address existing gaps in the research regarding the causal effect of virtual worship on flourishing, the factors that influence these effects, and how the social and emotional experience of worship potentially explain them. By actively partnering and collaborating with practitioners, we hope to ground the research in real-world experience in order to yield and disseminate findings that are both scientifically robust and practically relevant.