Boyer & Lienard/Ritualized Behavior: BBS Call for Commentators

Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and a link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article: Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals Pascal Boyer & Pierre Lienard This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL no later than May 23, 2006: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. Please reply by EMAIL no later than May 23, 2006. ======================================================================= *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= TITLE: Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals AUTHORS: Pascal Boyer and Pierre Lienard ABSTRACT: Rituals, intuitively recognizable by their stereotypy, rigidity, repetition and apparent lack of rational motivation, are found in cultural rituals, religious or not; in many children’s complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders; in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuro-psychology and neuro-imaging, we propose an explanation in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and reiteration of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This “swamps” working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and rituals in normal adults. Gradual cali-bration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system’s natural input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of em-pirical predictions follow from this synthetic model. KEYWORDS: CHILDHOOD RITUAL, COMPULSION, EVENT BOUNDARIES, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER, RITUAL, THOUGHT INTRUSION FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Boyer-04042005/Referees/ ======================================================================= SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ======================================================================= (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. 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