Emotional Salience, Emotional Awareness, Peculiar Beliefs, and Magical Thinking Howard Berenbaum, M. Tyler Boden, and John P. Baker University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Two studies with college student participants (Ns = 271 and 185) tested whether peculiar beliefs and magical thinking were associated with (a) the emotional salience of the stimuli about which individuals may have peculiar beliefs or magical thinking, (b) attention to emotion, and (c) clarity of emotion. Study 1 examined belief that a baseball team was cursed. Study 2 measured magical thinking using a procedure developed by P. Rozin and C. Nemeroff (2002). In both studies, peculiar beliefs and magical thinking were associated with Salience  Attention  Clarity interactions. Among individuals for whom the objects of the belief–magical thinking were highly emotionally salient and who had high levels of attention to emotion, higher levels of emotional clarity were associated with increased peculiar beliefs– magical thinking. In contrast, among individuals for whom the objects of the belief–magical thinking were not emotionally salient and who had high levels of attention to emotion, higher levels of emotional clarity were associated with diminished peculiar beliefs–magical thinking. Keywords: beliefs, magical thinking, emotional awareness, peculiarity Many researchers, particularly psychopathologists and social psychologists, have studied a variety of phenomena that have in common being irrational or illogical and that tend to be referred to with labels such as magical thinking and peculiar beliefs. Nemer- off and Rozin (2000) defined magical thinking as intuitions or beliefs that “transcend the usual boundary between the mental/ symbolic and physical/material realities . . . and . . . follows the principles of similarity and contagion” (p. 5). Using a broader definition than that provided by Nemeroff and Rozin (2000), Meehl (1964) defined magical ideation as a “belief, quasi-belief, or semiserious entertainment of the possibility that events which, according to the causal concepts of this culture, cannot have a causal relation with each other, might somehow nevertheless do so” (p. 54). A widely used instrument for measuring magical thinking, the Magical Ideation Scale (Eckblad & Chapman, 1983), includes items such as “I have sometimes sensed an evil presence around me, although I could not see it” and “I have sometimes felt that strangers were reading my mind.” Magical thinking is also manifested in behaviors and preferences, such as preferring a normally shaped piece of fudge to a piece of fudge in the shape of feces and being disinclined to sleep in a hotel bed with fresh- laundered sheets that had previously been slept in by a murderer (see Rozin & Nemeroff, 2002, for a review). Peculiar beliefs, which in their extreme form are considered delusions, have been defined as beliefs that are presumed (by scientists, at least) to not be veridical (Berenbaum, Kerns, & Raghavan, 2000). Examples of peculiar beliefs include “ghosts exist” and “aliens are among us.” Virtually all magical beliefs would also be considered peculiar beliefs, whereas some peculiar beliefs might not be considered magical beliefs. For example, using the definition of magical thinking proposed by Nemeroff and Rozin (2000), the belief that a baseball team will fail to achieve success because it was cursed by a disgruntled fan 60 years ago would not be considered evidence of magical thinking because it does not follow the principles of similarity and contagion; it should be noted, however, that re- searchers who define magical thinking more broadly, such as Meehl (1964), would consider this to be a magical belief. Magical thinking and peculiar beliefs are rather common. For example, approximately one quarter of Americans believe in as- trology, clairvoyance, ghosts, and communication with the dead (Vyse, 1997). Although magical thinking and peculiar beliefs are common, the factors that account for individual differences in such phenomena are not well understood. Understanding how and why individuals engage in magical thinking and hold peculiar beliefs is important for two reasons. First, peculiar beliefs, such as belief in ESP, ghosts, and good-luck charms, are often important parts of people’s lives (Boden & Berenbaum, 2004). In addition, odd or peculiar beliefs are considered a core feature of a variety of different forms of psychopathology including schizotypal person- ality disorder, anorexia nervosa, and obsessive– compulsive disor- der (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Delusions, which are related to and may simply be more extreme versions of peculiar beliefs (e.g., Berenbaum, 1996; Berenbaum et al., 2000; Strauss, 1969; Verdoux & van Os, 2002), are also found in numerous forms of psychopathology, most notably the psychotic disorders (al- Howard Berenbaum, M. Tyler Boden, and John P. Baker, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. M. Tyler Boden is now at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, California. John P. Baker is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point. Parts of this research were supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH62552. We thank Melissa Milanak, Natasha Rajabali, Eric Bengtsen, and Bryan Kolberg for their assistance with Study 2. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Howard Berenbaum, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820. E-mail: hberenba@uiuc.edu Emotion © 2009 American Psychological Association 2009, Vol. 9, No. 2, 197–205 1528-3542/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0015395 197 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. 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