title: Counterintuitive Religious Ideas and Metaphoric Thinking: An Event-Related Brain Potential Study.
abstract: It has been shown that counterintuitive ideas from mythological and religious texts are more acceptable than other (non-religious) world knowledge violations. In the present experiment we explored whether this relates to the way they are interpreted (literal vs. metaphorical). Participants were presented with verification questions that referred to either the literal or a metaphorical meaning of the sentence previously read (counterintuitive religious, counterintuitive non-religious and intuitive), in a block-wise design. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results converged. At variance to the literal interpretation of the sentences, the induced metaphorical interpretation specifically facilitated the integration (N400 amplitude decrease) of religious counterintuitions, whereas the semantic processing of non-religious counterintuitions was not affected by the interpretation mode. We suggest that religious ideas tend to operate like other instances of figurative language, such as metaphors, facilitating their acceptability despite their counterintuitive nature.
authors.affiliation: Center for Human Evolution and Behaviour, UCM-ISCIII.
authors.forename: Sabela
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fondevila
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychology, Humboldt-University at Berlin.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Aristei
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychology, Humboldt-University at Berlin.
authors.forename: Werner
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Sommer
authors.affiliation: Center for Human Evolution and Behaviour, UCM-ISCIII.|Psychobiology Department, Complutense University of Madrid.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jiménez-Ortega
authors.affiliation: Center for Human Evolution and Behaviour, UCM-ISCIII.|Psychobiology Department, Complutense University of Madrid.
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Casado
authors.affiliation: Center for Human Evolution and Behaviour, UCM-ISCIII.|Psychobiology Department, Complutense University of Madrid.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Martín-Loeches
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019545:Intuition; D008297:Male; D019365:Metaphor; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: ERPs; Language comprehension; Metaphorical meaning; N400; Religious concepts