Altered States of Consciousness during an Extreme Ritual

Ellen Morgan Lee · Kathryn R. Klement · James K. Ambler · Tonio Loewald · Evelyn M. Comber · Bria Pruitt +1 more

43 citations0/0 files storedPLoS ONE

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs Psychedelics and Drug Studies Flow Experience in Various Fields

Abstract

Extreme rituals (body-piercing, fire-walking, etc.) are anecdotally associated with altered states of consciousness-subjective alterations of ordinary mental functioning (Ward, 1984)-but empirical evidence of altered states using both direct and indirect measures during extreme rituals in naturalistic settings is limited. Participants in the "Dance of Souls", a 3.5-hour event during which participants received temporary piercings with hooks or weights attached to the piercings and danced to music provided by drummers, responded to measures of two altered states of consciousness. Participants also completed measures of positive and negative affect, salivary cortisol (a hormone associated with stress), self-reported stress, sexual arousal, and intimacy. Both pierced participants (pierced dancers) and non-pierced participants (piercers, piercing assistants, observers, drummers, and event leaders) showed evidence of altered states aligned with transient hypofrontality (Dietrich, 2003; measured with a Stroop test) and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; measured with the Flow State Scale). Both pierced and non-pierced participants also reported decreases in negative affect and psychological stress and increases in intimacy from before to after the ritual. Pierced and non-pierced participants showed different physiological reactions, however, with pierced participants showing increases in cortisol and non-pierced participants showing decreases from before to during the ritual. Overall, the ritual appeared to induce different physiological effects but similar psychological effects in focal ritual participants (i.e., pierced dancers) and in participants adopting other roles.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1990Flow: the psychology of optimal experience 1991Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 1998Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?1992Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness.1988Optimal Experience 1990Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York (HarperPerennial) 1990.1996Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure Optimal Experience: The Flow State Scale

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.