DeSteno’s book, “How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion,” looks at the science behind religious practices and explores how they can be utilized by all individuals, regardless of religious affiliation, to lead their best lives.

“The book is my attempt to kind of look at rituals from lots of religions across the road of life, from birth to death, and to try and understand from a psychological scientific perspective, how and why they may help people,” DeSteno said.

The book identifies several fundamental religious practices that are used to encourage healthier states of mind, before connecting them with scientific studies to illuminate precisely how these rituals are psychologically beneficial. 

“We do a lot of work on gratitude, showing how gratitude makes people more honest, more generous, and more helpful,” DeSteno said. “Lots of prayer practices lead you to experience feelings of gratitude that make people more honest and more generous … What I began to realize is that a lot of things that we had been discovering that help people become more moral and more connected, religions have been using for thousands of years.”

DeSteno spoke to the importance of respecting all religious beliefs and valuing the breadth of knowledge and insight that can be gained through studying religious traditions.

“Everybody’s ‘-ism’ is to be respected; whether that’s Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism or atheism, everybody is entitled to their own belief — science can’t prove which of those is right, but we can look at the practices in a mutually respectful way and see what we can learn,” he said.

Uniting the old with the new, DeSteno said the modern rise in recreational psychedelic use bears resemblance to traditional religious rituals when it comes to the desired effects on one’s mental state — causing an ethereal experience or alleviating symptoms of depression and PTSD — but unsupervised psychedelic use is not without its risks.

“When you separate the chemicals from the rituals that go with them, you actually increase the frequency of negative outcomes, so about 20% of psychedelic trips are negative experiences and about 8% of them result in people seeking psychiatric care,” DeSteno said. “I think that’s because, in the rituals, you have a shaman there to guide you, to support you, to help you make sense of things, to chant with you, which alters our physiology and makes us more calm when that sense of self-dissolution comes.”

Though the unsupervised use of psychedelics can have unpleasant ramifications, DeSteno said the medical field has begun to implement a similar methodology to that of religious rituals during studies involving psychedelics. 

“At Johns Hopkins, they’re doing experiments with psychedelics where they have a guide sit with the people in the clinical studies, now they don’t sing the same songs or do the things that the shamans do, but in some ways, they fill the same role,” DeSteno said. “They’re there, they give you comfort, they hold your hand, they help you make sense of what’s going on in the same way a shaman would, and the results are much better than if you go and take ayahuasca or psilocybin at your local hipster hangout.”

At the heart of the book is an exploration of how anyone can learn to develop practices that better their own lives, without discriminating between different religious affiliations.

“You can believe that these practices were divinely given by God … or you can believe they result from people trying stuff out over millennia and finding stuff that works,” DeSteno said. “I can’t answer the origin, but if we treat them as technologies that help people thrive in the world, then we can study them in respectful ways and learn from that. That’s the message of the book.”

Northeastern psychology students working in the Social Emotions Lab seek to understand how greater prosocial behavior can be elicited, using pragmatic studies centered around emotional response. Prosocial behavior, which refers to making decisions and actions that consider the wellbeing of others, has been shown to increase one’s own happiness and lifespan. DeSteno has run the lab since 1999.

“Our main goal is to understand how emotional states shape social, economic and moral decision making,” DeSteno said. “We do that with positive states and negative states, but what we’ve really coalesced around over the past 15 years or so is how emotional states that are moral in their overtones, so things like gratitude and compassion and other feeling states, can shape people’s behavior for the better.”

Jolie Wormwood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire who obtained her doctorate in psychology at Northeastern in 2012, gave an example of a study conducted in the lab where participants were asked to complete a long, tedious computer task, but just before finishing, the computer would crash. A member of the lab camouflaged as another participant would then offer to retrieve everyone’s data, and the participants’ levels of gratitude would be measured. The results of this particular study indicate that feelings of gratitude are not isolated events, but rather cause a ripple effect of grateful behavior.

“We found that people who were more grateful were more likely to offer help to other people, including not just for a mutually beneficial type of help, but also to novel strangers who we would introduce later on,” Wormwood said.

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilized social norms and created an atmosphere of unease concerning many social situations, but encouraging findings from the Social Emotions Lab indicate that people have experienced an uptick in gratitude during this trying time.

“COVID, contrary to what you might think, is peaking people’s gratitude levels,” said Shanyu Kates, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology who started working in the lab in 2018. “We’re finding that they’re a lot higher than normal, and that could just be that given the pandemic, it gives you time to reflect and really appreciate all that you have in your life.” 

A large emphasis for the research conducted in the Social Emotions Lab is understanding how people can effectively cultivate happiness and promote positive change on both an individual and societal level. 

“People often care a lot about doing good, but there are ways in which we’re not well attuned to understanding the best ways to do good and make the most impact we can,” said Matthew Coleman, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology who started working in the lab in 2020. “People have all these mistaken intuitions about their own well-being and their own happiness. I’m interested in understanding what these mistakes are and how they can be overcome so that people can make better decisions for improving their own lives.” 

Individuals working in the lab are met with a positive and cooperative atmosphere in which conducting research becomes an exciting endeavor.

“Dave’s lab is truly collaborative and supportive so that no matter whether you’re a volunteer, research assistant, a paid lab manager or a Ph.D. candidate, everyone is working together towards the same goal of doing quality research,” said Lisa Williams, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and a Northeastern alum. “At the end of the day, it’s about advancing what we know about emotions.”