Collective rituals are biologically ancient and culturally pervasive, yet few studies have quantified their effects on participants. We assessed two plausible models from qualitative anthropology: ritual empathy predicts affective convergence among all ritual participants irrespective of ritual role; rite-of-passage predicts emotional differences, specifically that ritual initiates will express relatively negative valence when compared with non-initiates. To evaluate model predictions, images of participants in a Spanish fire-walking ritual were extracted from video footage and assessed by nine Spanish raters for arousal and valence. Consistent with rite-of-passage predictions, we found that arousal jointly increased for all participants but that valence differed by ritual role: fire-walkers exhibited increasingly positive arousal and increasingly negative valence when compared with passengers. This result offers the first quantified evidence for rite of passage dynamics within a highly arousing collective ritual. Methodologically, we show that surprisingly simple and non-invasive data structures (rated video images) may be combined with methods from evolutionary ecology (Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Effects models) to clarify poorly understood dimensions of the human condition.

Center for Human Evolution and Behavior Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid Spain

Department of Psychology University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Victoria University of Wellington Wellington New Zealand ; LEVYNA Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Interacting Minds Center Aarhus University Aarhus Denmark

LEVYNA Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic ; Interacting Minds Center Aarhus University Aarhus Denmark

Section for Cognitive Systems Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Technical University of Denmark Lyngby Denmark

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