How does prayer exert its healing effects?
The psychologists have an idea: Most of the time, couples profess and believe in shared goals, but when they hit a rough patch, they often switch to adversarial goals, including retribution and resentment. These adversarial goals shift cognitive focus to the self, and it can be tough to shake that self-focus. Prayer appears to shift attention from the self back to others, which allows the resentments to fade. The study findings were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
