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This special dossier brings together contributions examining how rituals and collective gatherings contribute to the expansion of social identification and the construction of a sense of global community. Originating in an international seminar on rituals and global community, the included works converge on the view that rituals operate as emotional technologies that shape the processes of identification, regulate the dynamics of fear and care, and operate to either reinforce bounded group identities or expand the moral circle. The collection unites three complementary levels of analysis: a normative–theoretical framework on the emotional foundations of global community, a psychosocial process model of collective effervescence and self-transcendent emotions, and a qualitative and pedagogical approach grounded in cultural heritage and collective action. Together, the articles advance an integrated research agenda on ritual, collective emotion, and identification with all humanity, highlighting the scientific and civic importance of understanding when and how rituals foster more inclusive forms of belonging.
Este dossier especial reúne contribuciones que analizan el papel de los rituales y los encuentros colectivos en la ampliación de la identificación social y en la construcción de un sentido de comunidad global. Los trabajos, originados en un seminario internacional sobre rituales y comunidad global, convergen en la idea de que los rituales funcionan como tecnologías emocionales capaces de modelar procesos de identificación, regular dinámicas de miedo y cuidado, y expandir —o restringir— los límites del círculo moral. El dossier integra tres niveles de análisis complementarios: un enfoque teórico-normativo sobre los fundamentos emocionales de la comunidad global, un modelo psicosocial de los procesos de efervescencia colectiva y emociones autotrascendentes, y un abordaje cualitativo y pedagógico basado en patrimonio cultural e identidad colectiva. En conjunto, los artículos proponen una agenda de investigación integrada sobre ritual, emoción colectiva e identificación con toda la humanidad, subrayando la relevancia científica y cívica de comprender cuándo y cómo los rituales promueven formas más inclusivas de pertenencia.
This special dossier brings together a coordinated set of contributions focused on a shared and increasingly salient question in contemporary social psychology: how collective rituals and gatherings shape processes of identification, emotional experience, and moral concern in ways that may either reinforce bounded group identities or support broader, more inclusive forms of belonging. Rather than approaching ritual as a marginal or exclusively religious phenomenon, the dossier treats ritualized collective practices as central psychosocial mechanisms through which emotions, meanings, and identities are structured and transformed.
Across distinct methodological approaches and cultural contexts, the three contributions converge on a common analytical premise: collective rituals and gatherings can be understood as emotional and symbolic technologies. They organize co-presence, synchrony, shared attention, and meaning-making in ways that regulate fear and care, intensify emotional experience, and orient identification processes. Depending on their symbolic framing and interactional structure, such practices may consolidate parochial belonging or contribute to expanding the perceived circle of moral community.
Taken together, the dossier integrates three complementary levels of analysis. First, a normative–theoretical perspective examines the emotional foundations required for a viable sense of global community. Second, a psychosocial process perspective specifies the sequential mechanisms linking collective gatherings, collective effervescence, and self-transcendent emotions with inclusive identification. Third, a contextual and applied perspective shows how ritualized cultural practices and heritage-based experiences operate in lived settings, linking emotion, identity, pedagogy, and collective action. This multilevel articulation gives the dossier both conceptual coherence and empirical breadth.
In this sense, the present collection contributes to an emerging research program that repositions ritual at the center of social-psychological analysis of identity expansion and moral inclusion. It also responds to a broader contextual challenge: in a global environment marked by polarization, threat perception, and fragmented publics, understanding when and how emotionally intense collective practices widen rather than narrow the boundaries of belonging becomes both a scientific and civic priority.
A central concern for contemporary social psychology is understanding how identities are formed, expanded, and transformed through shared experience. While a good deal of literature has focused on intergroup relations, categorization processes, and ideological belief systems, comparatively less attention has been given to the structured collective practices through which emotional alignment and identification are enacted in embodied and symbolic ways. These practices are exemplified by rituals and collective gatherings.
Rituals are not limited to religious ceremonies or traditional celebrations. They include civic commemorations, public festivals, collective moments of silence, global observances, protest gatherings, artistic and cultural performances, and large-scale international events. Across these varied forms, rituals organize co-presence, attention, symbolism, and coordinated action. In doing so, they generate shared emotional climates that can intensify social bonds, stabilize meanings, and shape perceived boundaries of belonging.
The question that motivates this dossier is whether — and under what conditions — such ritualized collective practices can contribute to forms of identification that extend beyond local, national, or partisan frames toward identification with all humanity. This question connects several active research traditions: studies of collective effervescence, emotional synchrony, identity fusion, self-transcendent emotions, moral inclusion, and global identification. It also speaks to normative concerns about the psychological foundations of cooperation, justice, and care at transnational and global scales.
Importantly, the relationship between ritual and identification is not unidirectional nor uniformly inclusive. Collective rituals can deepen solidarity within bounded groups while simultaneously reinforcing symbolic boundaries against outsiders. High-intensity emotional convergence may produce parochial cohesion as readily as universalistic concern. For this reason, the analytical focus cannot rest on emotional intensity alone, but must also consider symbolic content, relational framing, and the moral narratives embedded in ritual practice.
Rituals can be understood as psychosocial mechanisms that modulate the balance between fear and care, threat and trust, exclusion and inclusion. They provide structured occasions in which participants experience themselves as part of a larger whole — but the scope of that “whole” is variable and socially constructed. Determining how rituals influence whether that whole is imagined narrowly or expansively is therefore a key research task.
This special dossier emerges from an international seminar “Rituals to Promote a Global Community,” jointly organized by the Keele Institute of Social Inclusion, Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz, and Clark University, and convened as a forum for interdisciplinary exchange on ritual, collective emotion, and global identification. The seminar brought together researchers working from complementary traditions — including social psychology, cultural psychology, peace psychology, and heritage studies — to examine how ritualized collective practices shape emotional experience and expand or constrain perceived community boundaries.
The present collection develops and consolidates key lines of inquiry opened in that meeting. Rather than functioning as conference proceedings, the articles included here were independently elaborated and peer-reviewed contributions that share a common conceptual focus while advancing distinct analytical strategies. Together, they form a thematically integrated but methodologically diverse set of studies addressing ritual as a psychosocial process with implications for identity, emotion, and collective orientation beyond the nation-state frame.
The scope of the dossier is intentionally multilevel. It includes a normative–theoretical analysis of the emotional foundations of global community, a process-oriented psychosocial model of collective gatherings and self-transcendent emotions, and a qualitative contextual investigation of ritual, cultural heritage, and collective action. This breadth reflects the editorial premise that ritual cannot be adequately understood through a single methodological lens. Its effects unfold simultaneously at symbolic, emotional, relational, and institutional levels. Each contribution of this dossier addresses this problem through a different empirical or theoretical entry point, allowing for analytic triangulation across frameworks and contexts. The editorial intention is not to close debate, but to clarify constructs, compare mechanisms, and stimulate cumulative research across cultural settings and methodological approaches.
Rituals can be understood as emotional technologies: structured collective practices that organize co-presence, attention, symbolism, and coordinated action in ways that reliably shape emotional experience and social identification. Rather than merely expressing pre-existing identities, rituals actively generate shared emotional climates and relational orientations. Through patterned interaction, synchrony, and symbolic framing, they intensify emotional convergence and help stabilize meanings of belonging.
From this perspective, rituals perform a regulatory function. They modulate the dynamic balance between fear and caring in social life, foregrounding either defensive boundary protection or relational openness and mutual concern. Celebratory and solidarity-oriented rituals may reduce perceived threat and strengthen communal care, whereas other ritual forms may consolidate cohesion through fear and exclusion. The psychosocial effects of ritual therefore depend not only on emotional intensity but on symbolic content and moral framing. Moreover, increases in inclusive feeling do not automatically translate into policy preferences or institutional commitments aligned with global care, highlighting the limits as well as the promise of much ritual process.
A core theoretical premise underlying this dossier is that any viable notion of global community must be grounded not only in cognitive recognition of shared humanity, but in emotional dynamics that make such recognition motivationally effective (
From this perspective, social life is structured by a recurring emotional tension between caring and fear. Caring supports openness, mutual recognition, and cooperation, whereas fear centers attention on self-protection, threat management, and defensive boundary-making. Whether relationships — interpersonal, intergroup, or international — take on a communal or adversarial character depends in large part on which of these emotional orientations becomes dominant in practice.
The theoretical framework developed in this dossier proposes that rituals play a distinctive role in this emotional grounding. As symbolic and embodied collective practices, rituals can strengthen caring ties, elicit awe and communal emotion, and expand perceived social boundaries. At the same time, the framework introduces an important qualification: increases in the felt sense of global community do not automatically produce support for policies that reduce fear-based governance. Emotional identification and political commitment, while related, remain analytically distinct and must be studied as such.
This distinction helps define a focused research agenda: to examine how ritualized collective experiences contribute to the emotional conditions of global identification, and under what circumstances those conditions translate — or fail to translate — into durable commitments to justice and inclusive governance.
A complementary line of work represented in this dossier develops process models of collective gatherings grounded in the Durkheimian tradition and updated through contemporary social-psychological research (
Within this framework, collective gatherings are understood as structured interaction sequences involving co-presence, shared attention, and behavioral synchrony. These conditions facilitate situated social identification with co-participants, identity fusion, and perceived emotional synchrony. Under favorable symbolic and relational conditions, such convergence can culminate in intense shared emotional states and self-transcendent emotions, including awe and kama muta, which are associated with expanded moral concern and inclusive identity orientations.
A key analytical distinction emphasized in this line of research is that collective effervescence refers to emotional intensity and shared activation, but is not inherently inclusive. High emotional convergence may reinforce parochial cohesion or, alternatively, support identification with all humanity depending on ritual framing, symbolic content, and boundary structure. Positive-valence collective rituals with low exclusionary content — such as certain carnivals and syncretic celebrations — are therefore treated as especially relevant contexts for examining links between effervescence, self-transcendent emotions, and non-parochial prosocial outcomes.
A third line of contribution in this dossier examines ritual and collective effervescence in the context of Intangible Cultural Heritage and community-based practices (
The qualitative study included in the dossier analyzes heritage-based rituals and celebrations in Colombia, using art-based and photo-elicitation methodologies within social psychology education. The findings show that heritage practices function as dynamic symbolic systems that reinforce group identity, activate collective emotions, and generate motivational incentives for participation and preservation. Through these processes, communities are constructed and experienced as meaningful “imagined” social worlds grounded in shared ritual experience.
This contribution adds an applied and pedagogical dimension to the dossier. It demonstrates how ritualized cultural practices can simultaneously operate as identity anchors, emotional convergence spaces, and catalysts for collective action. It also shows that heritage-based and art-based methodologies provide effective bridges between psychosocial theory and lived collective experience, expanding the empirical and educational scope of research on ritual and global identification.
The contributions gathered in this dossier converge on a shared insight: collective rituals and gatherings are not peripheral social phenomena, but central psychosocial processes through which emotions, identities, and moral orientations are shaped. When approached as emotional technologies, rituals can be analyzed in terms of how they organize shared experience, regulate fear and caring, and influence the perceived boundaries of community. Under certain symbolic and relational conditions, they can support identification that extends beyond bounded groups toward a broader sense of humanity.
At the same time, the evidence reviewed across the dossier underscores an important qualification. Emotional convergence and collective effervescence are not inherently inclusive. The same processes that generate unity and meaning can reinforce parochial identities if ritual forms are organized around exclusionary frames. For this reason, the study of ritual must attend not only to emotional intensity, but to symbolic scope, value orientation, and boundary structure. Process models of collective gatherings, together with normative analyses of caring and fear, offer a productive framework for making these distinctions explicit.
The dossier's complementary perspectives support a multi-method research agenda on ritual and global identification. Viewed together, the theoretical, processual, and applied perspectives presented here suggest that the expansion of moral community is not only a matter of belief or principle, but of emotionally grounded collective experience. Advancing research at this intersection — across cultures, methods, and ritual forms — may help clarify how shared practices can contribute, incrementally, to the development of a more caring and less fear-driven human world.
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