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By administering a carefully calibrated shock, electrodes like this can deliver a 5-minutes long burst of sharp pain, but without causing any damage.<\/p>\n

Participants were asked either to recite a prayer including the line \u201cDear God, I pray that you will help to relieve the pain and give me good health\u201d or to recite a similar request to a generic nobody (\u201cMr Hansen\u201d). Some were not given any instructions, and just sat and endured the pain.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n

As you can see from the graphic, the only group that reported reduced pain was the religious group who recited a prayer. Across all groups, each individual\u2019s expectations about how bad the pain would be were a good predictor of how bad the pain felt.<\/p>\n

However, for the religious group reciting a prayer (and that group alone), the amount of pain they reported was also influenced by how strong was their desire for pain relief.<\/p>\n

So these results show that religious people (and the religious people in this study were highly religious) feel \u2013 or at least report \u2013 less pain as a result of prayer, but especially if they really want it to happen.<\/p>\n

So much for the psychology, what about the physiology? Well, Jegind\u00f8 and the team also measured a bunch of physiological markers of pain \u2013 things like heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate etc.<\/p>\n

On the whole, they didn\u2019t find much. Although the religious people reported less pain while reciting prayers, their bodies reacted pretty much the same. <\/p>\n

However, religious people reading prayers did have a lower breathing rate. That\u2019s interesting, because a similar effect has been reported for people meditating. It\u2019s a tantalising comparison, although Jegind\u00f8 warns that these data are very preliminary and should not be over-interpreted.<\/p>\n

All-in-all, this new study supports previous studies<\/a> showing that religion can give pain relief through a kind of placebo effect. <\/p>\n

But what\u2019s new is that the physiological stress seems to be just as high. It\u2019s just that the people who pray and who want it to work say that, well, it really does work!<\/p>\n

$\"ResearchBlogging.org\"$ <\/a><\/span>
Jegind\u00f8 EM, Vase L, Skewes JC, Terkelsen AJ, Hansen J, Geertz AW, Roepstorff A, & Jensen TS (2012). Expectations contribute to reduced pain levels during prayer in highly religious participants. Journal of behavioral medicine<\/span> PMID: 22772583<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

$\"Creative$ <\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"