God-given Relief

Thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining random events.

Thinking about God may make you less upset about making errors, says a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride. 

The researchers recorded their brain activity as they completed a computerised task that was chosen because it has a high rate of errors. The results showed that when people were primed to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area associated with serving an alerting function when things go wrong. Interestingly, when atheists were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining random events, which reduces feelings of distress. For atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress.