Emotional salience, emotional awareness, peculiar beliefs, and magical thinking.
Two studies with college student participants (Ns = 271 and 185) tested whether peculiar beliefs and magical thinking were associated with (a) the emotional salience of the stimuli about which individuals may have peculiar beliefs or magical thinking, (b) attention to emotion, and (c) clarity of emotion. Study 1 examined belief that a baseball team was cursed. Study 2 measured magical thinking using a procedure developed by P. Rozin and C. Nemeroff (2002). In both studies, peculiar beliefs and magical thinking were associated with Salience x Attention x Clarity interactions. Among individuals for whom the objects of the belief-magical thinking were highly emotionally salient and who had high levels of attention to emotion, higher levels of emotional clarity were associated with increased peculiar beliefs-magical thinking. In contrast, among individuals for whom the objects of the belief-magical thinking were not emotionally salient and who had high levels of attention to emotion, higher levels of emotional clarity were associated with diminished peculiar beliefs-magical thinking.
Berenbaum
Howard
H
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. hberenba@uiuc.edu
Boden
M Tyler
MT
Baker
John P
JP
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D002755:Choice Behavior; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008273:Magic / Q000523:psychology; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D012044:Regression Analysis; D013483:Superstitions / Q000523:psychology*; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult