Social Engineering Blogs

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Christmas Rituals and Emotions

Is the holiday complete without traditional family celebrations and holiday rituals?

This is exactly what a team of Spanish and Chilean researchers attempted to evaluate in a 2011 study. Situating their research into an extensive tradition finding that ritual practices are important for personal happiness and family cohesion, Dr. Paez and his team examined what role holiday-specific traditions had on emotional well-being.

Importantly, past research found mixed results in the role of rituals and positive emotions, but there is a rich theoretical traditional that seeks to explain how rituals cultivate empathy and social cooperation. Anthropologists have seen them as critical in developing group bonds, for instance.

In studying Spanish students during the Christmas season, Dr. Paez and his team sought to test this theory. Not only does Christmas tend to consist of a relatively static set of universally practiced rituals, at least within a given culture, but many of these rituals are also particularly family-centric. This provides an effective case study for the role of ritual on emotions.

Overall, they hypothesized that the participation in family meals and holiday celebrations would generally boost positive affect and reports of life satisfaction. There should also be interpersonal benefits, they reasoned, in increasing attitudes of social support and what they call “collective emotions” or perceived family climate.

The study was primarily conducted by recruiting participants and asking them a series of Likert scale-style questions about positive/negative affect, life satisfaction, perceived social support, and social loneliness. These were applied shortly before Christmas, and then another series that specifically asked about these same measures was fielded post-holidays.

The vast majority of participants took place in ritual meals for Christmas, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve/Day. They found largely significant results, with negative affect and social loneliness both dropping, while life satisfaction and perceived social support both increased.

They managed to conclude both that participation in holiday rituals tended to lead to greater well-being, and that most people studied did in fact participate in family rituals.

This generally supported theoretical expectations that rituals would result in such a boost in positive mental attitudes, but it may be important to consider exactly what these rituals consist of. As we wrote last week, people tend to celebrate Christmas with a variety of different levels of consumption or spiritual activity.

In that blog, we discussed how holiday traditions that focus on family or religious rituals tend to result in a much happier and low-stress period, while those based in consumption and financial exchange tended to be stressful and anxiety-provoking. Hopefully future research replicates Dr. Paez’s findings in that way!

A Truly Merry Holiday

As holiday season approaches, many of us must reflect on what exactly will make the holidays most joyous.

In a fascinating study from 2002, a pair of researchers asked over a hundred people about their stress and happiness during the holidays, including questions about consumption behavior. They found that family-based or religious celebrations tended to result in the greatest levels of happiness, as opposed to materialist consumption practices.

While the holidays, and especially in the United States, Christmas have long and complicated histories, Drs. Tim Kassier and Kennon Sheldon explain how they tie together many different strands of tradition.

These include, of course, religious practices, rooted both in Christianity but in a variety of other faiths, but that these practices have also been tied to secular celebrations of Santa Claus, for instance. This isn’t even including the commercialist and materialist elements of the modern holiday season.

It is this historical and cultural framework that motivated their survey study. Specifically, they interviewed participants as to how they spent their Christmas, such as volunteering, worshipping, spending time with family, or exchanging/purchasing gifts.

Similarly, participants were also asked more detailed questions about how much money they spent on gifts and material consumption, how much they donated, and what the material value was of gifts that they had received.

Finally, the researchers inquired into questions of environmental consumption, such as trash produced or energy consumed as a part of their holiday practices. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they theorized that the more sustainable participants’ practices were, the happier they would end up feeling around the holidays.

Each of these questions was included in quantifiable measures in order to test the extent to which they predicted a happier or less pleasant Christmas season. Overall, most people reported a generally satisfactory Christmas, while just under half reported that they experienced a great deal of stress.

In terms of what tended to predict a better holiday, each of the measures of family engagement and religious activity were strong positive predictors.  This may be due to the inherent satisfaction of either activity, or out of the feeling that people are conforming to the socially expected emphasis of the holiday.

However, this latter point is undermined by the strong social pressures to engage in a consumptive and materially-focused holiday season. Neither expenditure, nor receipt, or great sums of gifts consistently predicted positive experiences. Often, the opposite was true. Moreover, environmentally sustainable practices tended to predict positive experiences.

This is not to tell you how to spend your holiday, of course, but given the extreme levels of stress that so many people experience around holidays, this will hopefully give you some sense as to what relieves the stress of others and promotes their happiness.

Facial Age and Recognition

Sometimes it is very important to evaluate age based on someone’s face alone, but this can be quite tricky.

This is actually a surprisingly pressing issue as age is relevant in all sorts of commercial, social, or political contexts. While it seems intuitive that we should be able to recognize people’s ages pretty easily, this has been challenged, if not refuted, by emerging research. For instance, in a series of experiments by Dr. Colin Clifford and his team, it appears that people tend to be incredibly bad at accurately judging age.

Not only is it often awkward or inconvenient to not be able to judge someone’s age, but age also undergirds a great deal of social evaluations. Group identification, emotional evaluations, and other assorted judgments are heavily determined by our perceptions of age, as should not be surprising to most readers.

Given the importance of age evaluations in social interactions, Dr. Clifford’s team attempted to expose experimental participants to a massive database of passport photographs, tasking them with estimating the age of the person.

The experimental design was relatively simple; though employing some complicated measures to avoid sampling biases and other confounding factors. Essentially, each of the 84 participants was asked to identify the age of almost 400 participants, ranging greatly in age and across gender.

Overall, they detected certain systemically incorrect estimations across the participants. Namely, young faces tended to be seen as older, while older faces tended to be seen as younger. This was actually in line with some previous research that found that age estimations tend to skew to middle aged faces.

Importantly, perceptions of age tended to by heavily impacted by the face most recently seen. This can take the form of bias related to gender, attractiveness, or facial expression. While this research sought to control for that, Dr. Clifford did find that, without controls, such dependency would have significant impacts on evaluations.

One interesting aspect of this path dependency is the impact that previous assessments of age have. After coding multiple faces as being young, participants were more likely to gauge subsequent pictures as younger than they were. This is particularly notable given that that is the opposite of the expected and normal bias of skewing towards middle aged assessments.

Dr. Clifford’s work not only helps demonstrate the challenges of accurately gauging age but also helps shed light on how we can be influenced by seeing other faces. For instance, a bartender who is used to seeing older faces might be more likely to overestimate a younger customer’s age.

While you may not be much better at age estimation than the average participant, it is helpful to keep these considerations in mind. Knowing a person’s age can be a helpful tool in correctly reading their emotions, but it can also help us gauge whether that person is a threat in various social situations.