Scientists Examine the Power of Prayer
Well this is interesting. A new paper in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology presents evidence that prayer can increase a person's ability to resists temptation--and offers a non-supernatural explanation for the phenomenon: The authors made use of two experimental paradigms to test the efficacy of prayer in preventing cognitive depletion. The first, called an emotion-suppression task, simply asked participants to watch a funny video but stifle all emotional responses, verbal and non-verbal, to the content. This requires a good amount of cognitive energy to pull off successfully. The second, called a stroop task, asked participants to indicate the ink color of various words flashed to them on a computer screen. The trick is that the words spell the names of various colors that are either consistent or inconsistent with the ink they are to identify. Check it out here . You’ll find that the inconsistent word/ink items are harder to respond to than