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Awe Research
My work
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2023
Hostage Negotiator Resilience: A Phenomenological Study of Awe
Jeff Thompson, Elizabeth Jensen
This study examines how a phenomenon, awe, when viewed as a resilience practice, can support law enforcement crisis hostage negotiators with their crisis work and personal wellness... it is suggested that awe practices could be incorporated into future negotiator trainings in order to increase resilience and assist negotiators personally and professionally.
NASA resilience and leadership: Examining the phenomenon of awe
Jeff Thompson
This study examines how a phenomenon, awe, along with related resilience practices, is perceived by a NASA medical and mental health professional, who also serves in a leadership role, and how awe has impacted their work and personal life.
Considering both their leadership role and how their work involves supporting the wellbeing of astronauts pre-mission, during missions, and post-mission, the potential impact of awe on the NASA expert has individual implications along with many others, especially in stressful environments. The results indicate that reflecting on awe experiences can support a person finding meaning and purpose in their life, evoke gratitude, increase social connectedness, promote optimism and other resilience skills in the moment, and generally have a sustainable positive effect.
Jeff Thompson
... Additionally, many of the awe definitions and stories included elements relating to resilience practices such as cognitive reappraisal, connectedness, gratitude, meaning and purpose in life, mindfulness, and self-efficacy. The results indicated that explaining awe and sharing awe narratives can potentially support people’s wellbeing, and that being exposed to awe narratives may support this as well.
Police well-being interventions: Using awe narratives to promote resilience
Jeff Thompson
... The analysis demonstrates that awe narratives can serve as a gateway to other resilience practices including cognitive reappraisal, emotional intelligence, gratitude, humility, finding meaning and purpose in life, mindfulness, optimism and hope, self-compassion, self-efficacy, social connection, and managing uncertainty and ambiguity. Based on the findings, awe narratives should be considered for implementation in future police mental health and resilience training as an evidence-based practice to support the police workforce.
Experiencing Awe: An Innovative Way to Enhance Investigations and Wellness
Jeff Thompson
Innovative advancements are needed to develop action-based initiatives to look after the number one priority in policing—the people serving in policing agencies. Research has shown that experiencing awe, when viewed as a strategy to enhance resilience, can benefit police officers in their work and in their personal lives.
2022
Enhancing resilience: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of The Awe Project
Jeff Thompson
Results indicate the program supported participants’ resilience and well-being through evoking awe and using other mindfulness and resilience practices, such as having a sense of agency, cognitive reappraisal, connectedness, meaning and purpose in life, and optimism and prospection.
Increasing Crisis Hostage Negotiator Effectiveness: Embracing Awe and Other Resilient Practices
Jeff Thompson, Amy R. Grubb, Noam Ebner, Alice Chirico, and Marta Pizzolante
Crisis and hostage negotiators are conflict resolution professionals who work toward peacefully resolving tense and possible volatile incidents. These law enforcement negotiators must possess comprehensive knowledge of the required skills and strategically deploy them to accomplish their goals. This exploratory Article examines the skills that make law enforcement negotiators effective and proposes how experiencing awe and a variety of other resilience practices can potentially enhance their abilities. The Article concludes by advocating that awe and other resilience practices can also benefit the greater conflict resolution community, including other types of negotiators and mediators.
Awe: Helping Leaders Address Modern Policing Problems
Jeff Thompson
Policing in America is facing unprecedented issues, including surges in violent crimes, record-low levels of morale, recruitment and retention issues, COVID-19 as the leading cause of death in policing in 2021, police suicide described as an epidemic, and an overall increase in mental health conditions. As the resilience of police officers is pushed to the limits, police leaders must develop innovative approaches to enhance and sustain their workforce’s mental health and well-being. This paper shares how one aspect of resilience—reflecting on and experiencing awe—can assist police leaders in exploring creative and meaningful ways to address current policing issues.
Awe Narratives: A Mindfulness Practice to Enhance Resilience & Wellbeing
Jeff Thompson
It is necessary to have available a variety of evidence-based resilience practices as we experience life’s stressors including the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. Evoking, experiencing, and reflecting on awe moments by developing and sharing an “awe narrative” is a type of mindfulness technique that can have the potential to help someone flourish, enhance their resilience, and have a positive impact on their overall wellbeing. This paper explores how constructing an awe narrative can assist the individual while also possibly having a positive impact on others.
Other research
2024
A tale of self-transcendence: awe fosters optimism
Pan & Jiang
The present research contributes to the literature by demonstrating that awe, a typical self-transcendent emotion, fosters optimism through self-transcendence. The findings offer new insights into cultivating optimism and highlight the importance of self-transcendence in this process.
Chirico et al.
Despite evidence of overlap between English and Italian structures, low correlations were found between Italian trait measures used to test the concurrent validity of the AWE-S in the Italian sample and AWE-S state dimensions. This study highlights cultural differences in awe experience, trait, and state variations, and provides new insights into the standardized induction of this emotion through simulated environments.
2023
Inspired by awe: Awe promotes inspiration via self- transcendence
Dai & Jiang
... Taken together, awe exerted a unique effect on inspiration, and self-transcendence mediated this effect.
Awe promotes moral expansiveness via the small-self
Young Son et al.
Across five studies (N = 990), we examined whether awe might promote moral expansiveness; that is, increased moral concern across a broad range of entities (e.g., out-groups, animals, plants, environments)... Our findings show awe expands our sense of connectedness to the broader world, and through this, increases the breath of our moral concern.
Virtual Reality for Awe and Imagination
Alice Chirico, Andrea Gaggioli
...This line of research draws on empirical evidence of the awe-creativity link to broaden the discourse and consider the potential impact of this emotion on core beliefs about the world. The combination of VR with these theoretical and design-oriented approaches may enable a new generation of potentially transformative experiences that remind people that they can aspire to more and inspire them to work toward imagining and creating a new possible world.
Alice Chirico, Marta Pizzolante, et al.
...These results indicated that awe-inspiring virtual nature can influence socially engaging pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors but not personally engaging ones.
Alexander Smalley, Matthew White
...Sunrise and sunset were the most valued conditions within both environments, outcomes that were partially mediated through increased ratings of beauty and awe.
Awe Sparks Prosociality in Children
Eftychia Stamkou, Eddie Brummelman, Rohan Dunham, Malica Nikolic, Dacher Keltner
Rooted in the novel and the mysterious, awe is a common experience in childhood, but research is almost silent with respect to the import of this emotion for children. Awe makes individuals feel small, thereby shifting their attention to the social world... children between 8 and 13 years old viewed movie clips that elicited awe, joy, or a neutral (control) response. Children who watched the awe-eliciting clip were more likely to spend their time on an effortful task (Study 1) and to donate their experimental earnings (Studies 1 and 2), all toward benefiting refugees.
2022
Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health
Maria Monroy, Dacher Keltner
How do experiences in nature or in spiritual contemplation or in being moved by music or with psychedelics promote mental and physical health? Our proposal in this article is awe. To make this argument, we first review recent advances in the scientific study of awe...
Experimental elicitations of awe: a meta-analysis
Pérez et al.
Images, videos, autobiographical recall, and naturalistic exposure were effective in eliciting awe. Exploratory analyses suggested that some processes involved in changes in the self can be related to experimental awe elicitations. These findings suggest awe is a discrete emotion and identifies areas for future investigation.
Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults
Sturm et al.
Compared with participants who took control walks, those who took awe walks experienced greater awe during their walks and exhibited an increasingly “small self” in their photographs over time. They reported greater joy and prosocial positive emotions during their walks and displayed increasing smile intensity over the study. Outside of the walk context, participants who took awe walks reported greater increases in daily prosocial positive emotions and greater decreases in daily distress over time... These results suggest cultivating awe enhances positive emotions that foster social connection and diminishes negative emotions that hasten decline.
How Does Awe Fuel Information Seeking? A Mixed-methods, Virtual Reality Study
Urban
The findings suggest that awe-inspiring VR content may be a valuable technique to promote intrinsic motivations for inquiry, but future design research is necessary to bridge the gap between intent and behavior.
Uncovering the Effects of Awe on Meaning in Life
Yuwan Dai, Tonglin Jiang, Miao Miao
The results showed that awe increased MIL via motivating purpose pursuit but decreased MIL by reducing the sense of significance. Overall, awe increased MIL, which was driven mainly by the mediating effect of purpose pursuit. Our findings suggest that awe is not a purely positive emotion, and it affects MIL in a complex way.
No one is an island: Awe encourages global citizenship identification
Minjae Seo, Shiyu Yang, Sean M Laurent
Four experiments found that varied awe elicitors and cues boost global citizenship identification by first increasing perception of the self as small...Given global problems such as pandemics and climate change, our findings have implications for how emotions can promote a sense of shared responsibility when commitment across borders is essential.
Awe motivates authentic-self pursuit via self-transcendence: Implications for prosociality
Tonglin Jiang, Constantine Sedikides
...Finally, in Studies 11-14 (N = 868), awe-induced authentic-self pursuit was linked with higher general prosociality, but lower inauthentic prosociality. The findings invite a reexamination of awe's relation with the self, while highlighting the complexity and intricacy of that relation.
The Social Effects of an Awesome Solar Eclipse
Sean Goldy, Nickolas M. Jones, and Paul K. Piff
Further, individuals who exhibited elevated awe surrounding the eclipse used more prosocial, affiliative, humble, and collective language relative to their preeclipse levels and relative to users who exhibited less awe (Study 2). These findings indicate that astronomical events may play a vital collective function by arousing awe and social tendencies that orient individuals toward their collectives.
The curious case of threat-awe: A theoretical and empirical reconceptualization
Srinwanti H Chaudhury, Nitika Garg, Zixi Jiang
Threat-based awe, or threat-awe, has been conceptualized as a fear-centric, negative-valenced variant of awe, although awe is a positive emotion embodying wonder and amazement. This research, however, argues that threat-awe is a mixed emotion rather than a negatively valenced subaspect of awe. We tested this conceptualization using two methodologies: (a) the theoretical framework of cognitive appraisals and (b) measures of ambivalence.
Awe in the workplace promotes prosocial behavior
Liang Meng, Xu Wang
The results showed significant differences between prosocial intention and prosocial behavior in the three conditions. Importantly, awe evoked by workplace elicitors has a significant positive effect on prosocial behavior, and prosocial intention mediates this relationship.
The perceived duration of vast spaces is mediated by awe
Devin Michael Gill, Mirinda Whitaker, Zachary Olpin, Jeanine K Stefanucci
Greater vastness led to higher awe scores and longer duration estimates, with awe mediating the relation between vastness and time.
Awe in Childhood: Conjectures About a Still Unexplored Research Area
Claire Prade
The present article aims to specify this assumption. In a first part, features of awe and its differences with other epistemic emotions will be examined. Afterwards, conjectures about the emergence and development of awe in childhood will be made in order to understand the involvement of awe in early learning.
2021
Awe is associated with creative personality, convergent creativity, and everyday creativity
Zhang, et al.
Moreover, we found that daily curiosity explained the link between daily awe and daily creativity in Study 3. These results are the first to demonstrate a consistent link between awe and complementary measures of creativity.
Awe, Daily Stress, and Elevated Life Satisfaction
Yang Bai et al.
Mediation analyses revealed that (a) the association between awe and reduced daily stress can be explained by an appraisal of vastness vis-à-vis the self and (b) that the relationship between awe and decreased daily stress levels helps explain awe's positive influence upon life satisfaction. Overall, these findings suggest that experiencing awe can put daily stressors into perspective in the moment and, in so doing, increase well-being.
The Potential Role of Awe for Depression: Reassembling the Puzzle
Alice Chirico, Andrea Gaggioli
...we proposed an up-to-date unifying proposal of awe's functioning, which allowed for a revision of all the empirical evidence supporting the potential therapeutic role of awe for contrasting specifically MDD. The core message of this work concerns the elicitation of awe as a potential therapeutic integrative intervention for contrasting depression.
Intersections between awe and the sublime: a preliminary empirical study
Clewis, R. R., Yaden, D. B., and Chirico, A.
By operationalizing aspects of the sublime drawn from influential philosophical theories and comparing them with psychological measures of awe, we find a large degree of overlap between awe and the sublime, suggesting that these two literatures could inform one another.
Piloerection is not a reliable physiological correlate of awe
Jonathon McPhetres and Andrew Shtulman
While participants self-reported high levels of goosebumps and "the chills," there was no physical evidence of this response. These results suggest that piloerection is not reliably connected to the experience of awe-at least using stimuli known to elicit awe in an experimental setting.
The Underview Effect: Awe Under the Sea, Diving for Well-being
Cheryl L. Eisen
This capstone seeks to explore the complex emotion of awe and the effects of flow and anxiety on the experience of awe in scuba diving. Scuba diving is a strong elicitor of awe and is a challenging, high risk activity requiring both technical skill and a calm mind. In this mixed methods study, awe elicited by scuba diving was studied immediately following a scuba dive
Awe arises in reaction to exceeded rather than disconfirmed expectancies.
Gocłowska, M. A., et al.
While awe is thought to arise in reaction to expectancy-violating objects or events, classical expectancy violations (e.g., a red queen of spades playing card) do not tend to cause awe. To shed light on this problem, we distinguished two types of expectancy violations—those that disconfirm and those that exceed one’s expectancies—and we investigated whether awe is more likely to arise in reaction to one versus the other. We also looked at what appraisals constitute and are most important to the awe experience and how they structurally interact. To do this, we utilized network analysis and mapped out the network structure of appraisals linked to awe and to expectancy violations.
2020
Why Does Awe Have Prosocial Effects? New Perspectives on Awe and the Small Self
Building on theories regarding psychological selfhood, we propose that awe may interact with the self not just in terms of attentional focus but rather at multiple layers of selfhood. We further reinterpret the small self using the notion of the quiet ego from personality psychology. Linking awe to an enriched model of the self provided by personality psychology may be fruitful for explaining a range of phenomena and motivating future research.
Individual and Cultural Differences in Predispositions to Feel Positive and Negative Aspects of Awe
Masataka Nakayama, Y. Nozaki, Pamela Marie Taylor, D. Keltner, Y. Uchida
Two studies (total N = 1245) suggests that in both Japanese and US samples, predispositions to feel positive and negative aspects of awe were separable. However, there were cultural differences...
The awe some scientists experience can be regarded as a form of non-theistic spirituality, which is neither a reductive naturalism nor theism. I will attempt to resolve the tension between these views by identifying some common ground.
Awe Yields Learning: A Virtual Reality Study
H. Anna T. van Limpt – Broers et al.
The findings of the study showed that participants felt strong feelings of awe and scored highly on overview effect constructs. Moreover, results revealed learning gains were influenced by the overview effect. This study shows the potential of using immersive virtual reality experiences in educational programs, combining wonder and learning.
Awe and the interconnected self
Chen, S. K., and Mongrain, M.
We argue that awe may promote prosocial instincts through the recognition of one’s place in a vast interconnected world and be particularly beneficial in this age of rapid technological progress and social unrest.
Big Smile, Small Self: Awe Walks Promote Prosocial Positive Emotions in Older Adults
Virginia E. Sturm, Samir Datta, Ashlin R. K. Roy, Isabel J. Sible, Eena L. Kosik, Christina R. Veziris, Tiffany E. Chow, Nathaniel A. Morris, John Neuhaus, Joel H. Kramer, Bruce L. Miller, Sarah R. Holley, and Dacher Keltner
Exploring the awe-some: Mobile eye-tracking insights into awe in a science museum
Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Kimberly A. Quinn, William L. D. Krenzer, Christine Nguyen,
Jana Greenslit, and C. Aaron Price
In this exploratory study, we find relationships between how guests attend to features within an exhibit space (e.g., signage) and their feelings of awe. We discuss implications of using both methods concurrently to shed new light on exhibit design, and more generally for working in transdisciplinary multimethod teams to move scientific knowledge and application forward.
The construction of awe in science communication
Daniel Silva Luna and Jesse M. Bering
Based on the latest research in affective science, however, we challenge this narrow version of awe in science communication and instead advocate a broader account of this emotion in line with a constructionist perspective. We argue that there are a variety of awe types in science communication, each with different forms and functions in relation to the mandates within the multiplicity of contexts in this cultural space.
Awe liberates the feeling that “my body is mine”
Ryota Takano and Michio Nomura
Our findings suggest that awe might provoke a “liberation of the self” in terms of a sense of body ownership as awe has been thought to liberate existing schemas, hence informing the demonstrable implications of the psychological mechanisms of awe.
The conditions that underlie awe in design were explored through a survey in which participants reported 150 awe experiences, resulting in six design strategies. The paper describes these strategies and discusses how they can be used in a design process, giving attention to addressing the experiential value of awe.
2019
Awe, ideological conviction, and perceptions of ideological opponents
These findings indicate that awe may lead to uncertainty and ambivalence regarding one's attitudes, a form of epistemological humility, and that this in turn may promote reduced dogmatism and increased perceptions of social cohesion.
If experiences of awe-inspiring ceremonies, leaders, historical artefacts and natural features have a prosocial component that encourages consideration of group-level interests, it is possible that the "need for accommodation" component of awe is, in many cases, a social process. Within the framework of self-categorisation theory, it might be a process of adopting the identity of a group that is broader than family-based and friendship-based groups that one typically identifies with.
C. Anderson, Dante D. Dixson, Maria Monroy, D. Keltner
We found that dispositional awe was positively related to people's self-rated curiosity (Study 1) and how curious they were rated by their friends (Study 2). In Study 3, we found that dispositional awe was related to academic outcomes via curiosity.
M. van Elk, M. A. Arciniegas Gomez, W. van der Zwaag, H. V. van Schie, D. Sauter
...Together these findings suggest that a key feature of the experience of awe is a reduced engagement in self‐referential processing, in line with the subjective self‐report measures (i.e., participants perceived their self to be smaller)
Interpersonal awe: exploring the social domain of awe elicitors
Graziosi, M., and Yaden, D
Awe was elicited by close others compared to a neutral control, although the interpersonal form of awe was less intense than awe caused by nature. Qualitative analyses revealed that awe triggered by nature was defined by themes of beauty, while interpersonal awe was defined by themes of virtue or excellence of character.
The proximal experience of awe
Nelson-Coffey, S. K., Ruberton, P. M., Chancellor, J., Cornick, J. E., Blascovich, J., and Lyubomirsky, S.
These findings suggest that experiences that are commonly considered awe-inspiring—such as viewing a picturesque landscape—may be more appropriately conceptualized more broadly as self-transcendent. More work is needed to determine whether the documented benefits of awe may be more appropriately interpreted as the benefits of self-transcendent emotions.
Transcendence and sublime experience in nature: awe and inspiring energy
Bethelmy, L. C., and Corraliza, J. A.
Awe was defined by feelings of fear, threat, vulnerability, fragility, and respect for nature, which is perceived as vast, powerful, and mysterious. Inspiring energy was defined by feelings of vitality, joy, energy, oneness, freedom, eternity, and harmony with the universe.
Awe or Horror: Differentiating two emotional responses to schema-incongruence
Pamela Taylor, Yukiko Uchida
Study 1 observed significant differences between awe and horror in cognitive appraisals (e.g., certainty, legitimacy), indicating several areas of dissimilarity. Study 2 found evidence that awe and horror are both responses to schema-incongruence, as schema incongruence and NFA were salient in awe and horror, but not a contrast emotion.
Awe and Meaning: Elucidating Complex Effects of Awe Experiences on Meaning in life
Grace N Rivera, Matthew Vess, Joshua Hicks, and Clay Routledge
Positive affectivity has a robust positive effect on meaning in life, suggesting that positive awe experiences might increase meaning. At the same time, however, awe experiences lead to a diminished self that reflects feelings of smallness and insignificance, which might negatively predict meaning. We thus hypothesized that awe experiences can, in some contexts, produce competing indirect effects on judgments of meaning in life through happiness and small‐self feelings.
Jing-Jing Li, Kai Dou, Yu-Jie Wang, and Yan-Gang Nie
Mediational data demonstrate that the effects of awe on prosociality are explained, by improving STML self and future time perspective. These findings indicate that awe may help situate individuals within broader social contexts and enhance collective concern.
Awe-full uncertainty: Easing discomfort during waiting periods
Kyla Rankin, Sara Elizabeth Andrews, Kate Sweeney
We also found partial support for the benefits of an awe induction: People consistently experienced greater positive emotion and less anxiety in the awe condition compared to a neutral control condition, although these benefits did not always improve upon the positive control experience. Importantly, these benefits emerged regardless of one’s predisposition to experience awe.
Experimentally induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception
Michiel van Elk and Mark Rotteveel
The current findings indicate that lab-induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception and we suggest that more ecologically valid ways to induce awe may be required in future studies.
Ekaterina R. Stepanova, Denise Quesnel, and Bernhard E. Riecke
The results indicate that the experience of being in “AWE” can elicit some components of awe emotion and induce minor cognitive shifts in participant’s worldview similar to the Overview Effect, while this experience also has its own attributes that might be unique to this specific medium.
2018
The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A multifactorial measure for a complex emotion
David B. Yaden, Scott Barry Kaufman, Elizabeth Hyde, Alice Chirico, Andrea Gaggioli, Jia Wei Zhang & Dacher Keltner
Awe is a complex emotion composed of an appraisal of vastness and a need for accommodation. The purpose of this study was to develop a robust state measure of awe, the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S... Exploratory factor analysis revealed a 6-factor structure, including: altered time perception (F1); self-diminishment (F2); connectedness (F3); perceived vastness (F4); physical sensations (F5); need for accommodation (F6).
Assessing the Experience of Awe: Validating the Situational Awe Scale
Awe: A Self-Transcendent and Sometimes Transformative Emotion
This chapter describes recent advances in the experimental literature on awe, reviews some methods of inducing this emotion in the lab, and discusses some theories regarding its functions.
Neural Basis of Dispositional Awe
Fang Guan, Yanhui Xiang, Outong Chen, Weixin Wang, Jun Chen
From awe to ecological behavior: the mediating role of connectedness to nature
Yan Yang , Jing Hu, Fengjie Jing, and Bang Nguyen
These findings indicate that awe helps broaden the self-concept by including nature and increase connectedness to nature, which in turn lead to ecological behavior. They also highlight the significance of connectedness in explaining why awe increases ecological behavior.
Oh, the things you don’t know: awe promotes awareness of knowledge gaps and science interest
Jonathan McPhetres
...these results provide the first empirical evidence of awe as an “epistemic emotion” by demonstrating its effects on awareness of knowledge gaps. These findings are also extended to the effects of awe on science interest as one possible outcome of awareness of knowledge gaps.
Denise Quesnel, Ekaterina R. Stepanova, Ivan A. Aguilar, Bernhard E. Riecke
Results suggest that AWE can elicit the target emotional experience of awe, prompt a transformative experience, and improve well-being in some participants.
The Impact o a Two-Week Intervention on Increased and Sustained Experiences of Awe
Sean Patrick Goldy
Results suggest that seeking out and attuning to awe for a prolonged period of time can increase daily and dispositional awe in a sustained way.
Absorption: How Nature Experiences Promote Awe and Other Positive Emotions
Matthew T. Ballew and Allen M. Omoto
Results indicate that nature fosters awe and other positive emotions when people feel captivated and engrossed in their surroundings.
2017
Y. Bai, Laura A. Maruskin, +5 authors D. Keltner
Evidence from the last 2 studies showed that the influence of awe upon the small self accounted for increases in collective engagement, fitting with claims that awe promotes integration into social groups.
The Dark Side of the Sublime: Distinguishing a Threat-Based Variant of Awe
Amie M Gordon, Jennifer E Stellar, Craig L Anderson, Galen D McNeil, D. Loew, D. Keltner
In the present research we tested whether there is a more negative variant of awe that arises in response to vast, complex stimuli that are threatening (e.g., tornadoes, terrorist attack, wrathful god)... Positive awe experiences in daily life (Study 4) and in the lab (Study 5) led to greater momentary well-being (compared with no awe experience), whereas threat-based awe experiences did not. This effect was partially mediated by increased feelings of powerlessness during threat-based awe experiences. Together, these findings highlight a darker side of awe.
Jennifer E. Stellar, Amie M Gordon, +5 authors D. Keltner
EEG correlates of ten positive emotions
Hu, X., Yu, J., Song, M., Yu, C., Wang, F., Sun, P., et al.
Based on the similarities of the participants’ ratings on the ten positive emotions, these emotions were further clustered into three representative clusters, as ‘encouragement’ for awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, pride, ‘playfulness’ for amusement, joy, interest, and ‘harmony’ for love, serenity...To our knowledge, our study provides the first piece of evidence on the EEG correlates of different positive emotions.
Affective and Cognitive Effects of Awe in Predicting Hopelessness and Brooding Rumination
Tarani, E.
2016
Awe’s effects on generosity and helping
...we found in two online experiments that the induction of awe, compared to the induction of amusement or a neutral condition, leads to increased prosocial behavioral intentions of generosity (spontaneous sharing of hypothetical gains) and help of a person in need – in hypothetical everyday life situations.
Seeing the world in awe : intra-individual and interpersonal changes
Claire Prade
The Mind of the “Happy Warrior”: Eudaimonia, Awe, and the Search for Meaning in Life
Alexander F. Danvers, Makenzie J. O’Neil, M. Shiota
Existential philosophy emphasizes the role of conscious analysis in developing a meaning framework, and we suggest that powerful awe experiences facilitate a cognitive and motivational mindset that is especially conducive to this personal work.
Experiencing versus contemplating: Language use during descriptions of awe and wonder
Kathleen E. Darbor, Heather C. Lench, William E. Davis & Joshua A. Hicks
There were differences in the language used to describe these positive emotional states, consistent with the theorised functions of each emotion. Awe was related to observing the world, reflected in greater use of perception words. Wonder was related to trying to understand the world, reflected in greater use of cognitive complexity and tentative words.
The Potential of Virtual Reality for the Investigation of Awe
Alice Chirico, David Bryce, Yaden, Giuseppe Riva, and Andrea Gaggioli
We suggest that virtual reality (VR) is a particularly effective mood induction tool for eliciting awe. VR provides three key assets for improving awe... We discussed the potential and challenges of the proposed approach with an emphasis on VR's capacity to raise the signal of reactions to emotions such as awe in laboratory settings.
Up speeds you down. Awe-evoking monumental buildings trigger behavioral and perceived freezing
Yannick Joye and Siegfried Dewitte
Overall, our findings suggest that very tall buildings can be a trigger of awe, and that experiencing this emotion can involve a state of behavioral freezing.
2015
P. Silvia, Kirill Fayn, Emily C. Nusbaum, R. Beaty
Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior
Paul K. Piff, Pia Dietze, M. Feinberg, D. Stancato, D. Keltner
Assessing whether practical wisdom and awe of God are associated with life satisfaction
Krause, N., and Hayward, R. D.
2014
Using a simulated environment to investigate experiences reported during space travel
Shaun Gallagher, et al.
2013
Awe, Uncertainty, and Agency Detection
Piercarlos Valdesolo and Jesse Graham
Neurophenomenology: An integrated approach to exploring awe and wonder
Lauren Reinerman-Jones, et al.
2012 and previous
Awe Activates Religious and Spiritual Feelings and Behavioral Intentions
Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being
Melanie Rudd, K. Vohs, J. Aaker
The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept
M. Shiota, D. Keltner, Amanda K. Mossman
Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion
A Conceptual Clarification of the Experience of Awe: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis