You may have heard about the Tumblr blog Unhappy Hipsters, whose creators add their own sad captions to photos taken from the modern architecture and design magazine Dwell. Now, designer Ingrid Fetell has taken to her Psychology Today blog to look at how modern design might actually affect our mood, observing:

A 2007 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia revealed that angular forms have a strange, unconscious emotional effect on us. Viewing angular forms, as opposed to curved forms, triggers activation in the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure in the limbic system of our brains associated with emotional memory—specifically fear. We may not feel any conscious fear, but this brief moment of activity translates to a general sense of dislike for these objects. One hypothesis is that in nature, angles suggest something to watch out for—a tree branch, a sharp rock, the edge of a cliff—all things around which a heightened sense of attention and caution is appropriate. But perhaps too many angles in our homes sets us on edge, and contributes to the sense of negative affect we feel toward much modern design.
Finally, I think that modernism’s restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance—a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Widely reported last week was a study on prayer and forgiveness. It’s by the same crew that gave us the study last year on prayer and gratitude, and has (broadly speaking) the same methodological concerns (it only recruited students who already pray and uses measures that are difficult to interpret).
But, to be fair, this is an interventional study of the effects of prayer that is basically sound, and the authors deserve kudos for trying to assess this unfashionable area. So what did it show?
Well, they recruited 67 Christian students in Florida and asked them either to pray for a friend or to pray without specifying what for or to think positive thoughts about their friend. They had to do this every day for four weeks.
Then they measured the degree of forgiveness they felt toward their friend. As the graph shows, forgiveness was greatest in the “pray for a friend” group.

They suggest that the reason for this is that prayer creates a generalized feeling of selflessness, although this seems theoretically unlikely to me and the evidence they provide for it is rather tendentious.
So what do we know about prayer? Well, brain scans suggest that praying is much like talking to a friend. So maybe talking to a confidant about a third party helps to generate forgiveness.
Furthermore, although they didn’t measure the beliefs of the participants, it’s likely (given the local culture) that many of them believed in an active, personal god who can step in to change things in the world around them—including other people.
It’s much easier to have forgiving thoughts about people if you think that they are going to change. If these students thought that praying for someone is sufficient to change them for the better, it seems very likely that would made them feel more forgiving.

Marc Hauser of Harvard University and Ilkka Pyysiäinen of the University of Helsinki have published an opinion piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that looks at the link between morality and religion.
They point out that several psychological studies (many conducted using the Moral Sense Test) have shown that when it comes to unfamiliar moral dilemmas, atheists and those with a religious background show no difference in their moral judgments—suggesting that our intuitive judgments of right and wrong operate independently from our religious beliefs. Experiments did show that people with a religious background were more likely to sacrifice their own lives to save the greatest number of others, but the researchers argue that “religious pressures might lead people to offer this judgment because they believe it is the morally appropriate answer. What religion can do, and what political and legal institutions can do as well, is alter local and highly specific cases. And yet, they appear to have no influence at all on the intuitive system that operates more generally, and for unfamiliar cases.”
Here’s a good example to illustrate the point:

In a wide variety of studies, using different methods and populations, subjects consistently judge actions that cause harm as worse than omissions causing the same harm—a distinction referred to as the omission bias. In some studies, and in some populations, specific examples might not reveal the omission bias, but rarely does one observe a reversal such that omissions are judged more harshly than actions. For example, although the Netherlands passed a bill in 2001 making both active euthanasia (administering an overdose to an individual who is suffering) and passive euthanasia (allowing to die by terminating life support) legally permissible, the Dutch show as strong an omission bias as American subjects, despite the fact that in the USA, active euthanasia is illegal. This reveals that the law, as a formal moral system, can only provide specific guidelines for specific actions, but such knowledge fails to penetrate or alter our folk moral intuitions. According to this view, and as noted above, explicit religious commitment seems to be comparable to law, providing specific guidelines for specific actions, but dissociated from the system that mediates moral intuitions.

The authors hope we can use their paper as a jumping-off point to further explore (and, in some ways, rethink) the complex relationship between religion and morality, concluding:

It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we have discussed, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence.