Abstract
This paper proposes that the transmission of common religious
concepts-such as witches, hostile spirits, benevolent gods, and
ancestors-is facilitated by the trajectory of the human emotional
response. Because these religious concepts become associated with
existentially relevant components of emotional themes they are likely to
be internalized, recalled, transmitted, and institutionalized. Emotion
is here treated as an evolved, and universally inherited, social
heuristic that modulates interpersonal perception and action. Benevolent
and malevolent religious entities and associated practices are posited
as supernatural extensions of an imagined social world that is partially
predicated on, and made meaningful by, the interpretive and motivational
functions of emotion. While cultural psychology tends to focus on how
culture shapes psychology, this paper begins to construct a theoretical
framework that views culture and psychology as mutually constitutive.
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