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We are investigating the roles of individual differences in eliciting reactions to public expressions of gratitude to God among both religious and non-religious people. In this particular study, we will assess the roles of self-esteem, people’s relationships with god (attachment to god, closeness to god), and perceptions of god (negative emotions towards god) in predicting valenced emotional reactions and desire to affiliate with the people making the expressions. In addition, we will test potential mechanisms of these relationships, specifically perceptions of the people making the expressions related to status (perceived status discrepancy) and to relationships with god (perceived discrepancy in quality of relationship with god).

Pilot study to test effectiveness of a state self-objectification manipulation

Follow-up study to test whether manipulating state self-objectification influences Sex is Power Beliefs, Enjoyment of Sexualization, and Self-Sexualizing Behaviors.

We plan to run a series of studies investigating the roles of self-esteem, attachment to God, and religious identity (among other individual differences) in eliciting valenced emotional reactions to gratitude to God expressions, as well as evaluations of the people making the expressions. In order to do this, we would like to test and validate stimuli (naturalistic videos and bogus social media posts) portraying gratitude expressions to ensure that they contain various levels of different characteristics that are ideal for our future research. We would also like to preliminarily test several of our hypotheses related to people’s reactions to the expressions.