Awesome!

Many of us know the pleasures of feeling awe. Whether hiking majestic peaks, admiring great art, or watching the birth of a child, experiences like these fill us with a sense of wonder, challenging our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Now a new study sheds some light on awe’s unique function. Through a series of experiments, an international team of researchers were able to show that experiences of awe diminish our sense of self-importance, creating a “small self” perspective that seems to aid us in forming social groups. But, while many of us know it when we feel it, science has not understood awe as an emotion very well. Though research suggests awe increases our well-being and leads us to be more altruistic and generous, it’s still not clear why that would be.

Yang Bai—a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the paper’s authors—believes her research lends insight into awe’s evolutionary purpose. Awe helps you to stop focusing so much on yourself and to look more to what’s around you—toward other people and the world at large, she says. And, by doing that, people will naturally seek more social engagement.

How Culture Shapes Awe

In the first experiment, participants from China and the United States filled out daily diaries, writing about either an experience of awe (if they’d had one that day), an experience of joy (if they hadn’t experienced awe), or something they wanted to share (if they had experienced neither emotion).

The participants also gauged how strongly they felt various positive and negative emotions—like hope, gratitude, envy, or embarrassment—and filled out a quick measure of “self-size” in which they were asked to choose a circle that most represented their sense of self from a series of progressively larger circles. (This measure of self-size and others had been validated previously and were not connected to one’s actual body size.)

Analyzing the contents of the diaries, the researchers found that both groups reported a smaller self-size after experiences of awe than of joy, and that the self-size was related to the degree of awe they felt. In addition, they found that other positive or negative feelings did not affect self-size ratings.

This result did not surprise Yang Bai. “When I experience awe, I feel like I’m just a small piece of this great world,” she says. “It’s a kind of a metaphorical sense of the self that is shrinking during awe.”

Interestingly, though, the reported elicitors of awe were different for Chinese participants, who chose more experiences involving other people rather than ones involving nature. In addition, Chinese participants had greater effects from awe—meaning, that their self-size measures were significantly smaller than Americans’ self-size experiencing similar levels of awe.

“People may have a different understanding of awe, but the small self is the key component of the experience,” she says. “But, because different cultures provide different contexts, there are some differences.”

As the self shrinks, our world expands

To further the understanding of awe and the small self, Bai and her colleagues asked random people in two tourist locations—a tourist trap called Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and a scenic lookout of Yosemite Valley—to fill out a short survey measuring how much awe, joy, pride, sadness, fear, or fatigue they felt. Then, they asked the people to draw a picture of their current selves in that moment, labeling themselves with the word “me” and adding anything else they wanted to add to the drawing.

Results showed that people in Yosemite experienced more awe than those in Fisherman’s Wharf, regardless of nationality. In addition, people who completed the portraits in Yosemite drew significantly smaller pictures of themselves and smaller “me” labels than those at Fisherman’s Wharf. This smaller self was firmly connected to a feeling of awe, even when controlling for all of the other emotions they measured.

“While we’re feeling small in an awe moment, we are feeling connected to more people or feeling closer to others. That’s awe’s purpose, or at least one of its purposes.”―Yang Bai, University of California, Berkeley

Still, it was unclear if awe caused a smaller sense of self. So, Bai and colleagues conducted a lab experiment, in which Chinese and American participants were randomly assigned to watch either an awe-inspiring video of nature or a humorous video, with animals in natural settings being dubbed with silly human voices. Before and after the video, the participants filled out a questionnaire measuring self-size, positive and negative emotions, and perceived social status.

“People can easily ignore the benefits of feeling small, of feeling humble,” she says. “But, we all feel the need to feel connection to other human beings, and awe plays a very important role in that.”

Results showed that the awe videos consistently elicited a smaller sense of self, but that small-self did not equate to feeling lower in social status. This, Bai believes, may help people—especially Americans, perhaps—better accept the idea that a small-self can be positive.

“People in the U.S. are often taught that they need to be independent and to rely on themselves; so, they may prefer to think of their self-size as larger—more dominant and confident,” she says. “But, the small-self brought on by awe doesn’t decrease social status. It’s something unique to awe.”

What does all of this have to do with social collectives? Additional experiments by Bai and her colleagues delved into this:

Awe Keeps Us Together

Chinese and American participants were again randomly assigned to watch an awe-inducing video or a humorous video and then instructed to draw a picture of their current social circle, using circles to represent people (including themselves) and distances between circles to represent how close they felt to each member of the social network. They also filled out a questionnaire about their emotions.

Afterwards, coders counted the number of circles to see how many people were in each participant’s social circle. Then, they measured the size of the circle labeled “me,” the average size of the circles representing others, and the average distance between each “other” circle and the “me” circle.

Results showed that participants feeling awe drew smaller circle sizes for the self, as one might expect given other experiments. However, feelings of awe did not decrease the average size of the other circles drawn, so that the “small-self” effect didn’t make everything look smaller.

In addition, for awe-filled American participants, the number of circles representing their social ties increased; for Chinese participants, the average distance between “other” and “me” circles decreased, but the number of social ties didn’t change significantly. Bai suggests this may have to do with cultural differences—Americans being more individualistic, and Chinese being more collectivist. But, regardless, she concludes, the small-self experienced in awe is tied to better social relationships.

“While we’re feeling small in an awe moment, we are feeling connected to more people or feeling closer to others,” she says. “That’s awe’s purpose, or at least one of its purposes.”

In the final experiment, Bai and her colleagues looked at awe and social cohesion, while also comparing the effects of awe versus shame—an emotion also linked to “small-self,” though not in the same way.

Participants filled out a survey which included a measure of their self-size. Then, they were prompted to recall an experience of awe, shame, or a neutral control (specifically, when they last did laundry) and to write about it. Afterwards, they again rated their self-size, and filled out measures of self-focus, engagement with others, self-esteem, social status, and sense of power.

Those who wrote about awe or shame both experienced a decreased self-size, as expected. But, the participants in the awe condition did not experience lower self-esteem, social status, or power. Instead, they experienced greater collective engagement than those who experienced shame.

“We can feel small in response to different kinds of emotions—for example, when you feel embarrassed, you will also feel small. However, the smallness brought on by awe is unique,” says Bai.

She hopes that by spreading the idea of awe and the small self, she will help people to understand why they need more awe in their lives.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center:

The Benefits of Feeling Awe

We talk with a researcher and a veteran at UC Berkeley to try to understand the impact of awe on well-being.

BY JEREMY ADAM SMITH | MAY 30, 2016

Camping in New Mexico, far from cities and their light pollution, Craig Anderson would look up and feel small under the countless clear, bright, mysterious stars. Back home, he’d watch Star Trek and imagine “going where no one has gone before,” wondering what life might be like in all those points of light in the sky.

Craig Anderson

Today, he’s a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. For the past six years, he’s worked with Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, in trying to understand the emotion those stars provoked. They’ve combined an online platform called Project Awe, which gathers stories and records of awe-inspiring experiences, with studies in the lab and out in nature.

Their in-the-wild experiments have brought groups of Bay Area high schoolers and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan—now all students at UC Berkeley—on white-water rafting trips along the South Fork of the American River. Their goal: to understand how the experience might affect their well-being—and perhaps even alleviate symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Linda Saunders is one of the veterans. She is a Marine who served in Iraq in 2009-2010, and then in Afghanistan three years later. In between tours, she became the mother of twins, who are now five years old. She went straight from Afghanistan to UC Berkeley in 2014 to start studying environmental science.

Anderson and Saunders will both be talking about the rafting trip at the upcoming GGSC conference, “The Art and Science of Awe,” on June 4 in Berkeley, California. I sat down with them both to explore their work and experience.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Craig, what is awe?

Craig Anderson: Awe happens when you encounter something so vast that you don’t feel like you wrap your mind around it completely, right at that moment. So, awe could involve experiences of profound beauty, or feeling super-connected to other people or to nature or to humanity as a whole.

JAS: Why do we feel awe? Why not just joy or excitement?

CA: In Dacher’s lab, we take what we call an evolutionary functional approach to emotion, grounded in the work that Charles Darwin did. This idea suggests that all the emotions that we see—sadness and anger and happiness—evolved as a feature of our species, not just cultural learning. Over the evolutionary history of our species, these emotions have helped us to adapt and respond adaptively to different kinds of situations.

Awe is a response to things that are perceptually vast, that we don’t fully understand at the moment. This makes it a very unique emotion. We find behaviors associated with awe that are adaptive in situations that are super novel, like trying to connect with other people or just being curious. When faced with something that blows your mind, you want to find out more information.

"Awe helps you to stop focusing so much on yourself and to look more to what’s around you—toward other people and the world at large, she says. And, by doing that, people will naturally seek more social engagement."

JAS: What specific things were you measuring in the rafting study?

CA: Before the trip started we had people rate their well-being, generally construed; how well they are getting along with people; how well they are sleeping; their own sense of happiness; those type of things. We followed up with participants one week after the trip via email and had them complete those measures again to capture change that had happened before the rafting trip to a week later.

In any emotion study, we like to get converging evidence. The first step is to gather subjective experiences. We also ask people: “Hey, how much awe did you feel? How much joy? How much amusement and pride?”

JAS: In my experience, when people try to verbalise awe, they often lapse into inarticulateness. Is that a problem when you’re investigating awe?

CA: Yeah. Awe experiences can be big, right? You know, if we just ask people “Hey, tell us about a time you experienced this intense awe,” we get a lot of stories about, you know, the birth of a child. How do you really capture bringing a new life into the world? Awe can be a very strong experience, so it’s a lot harder to describe awe than to describe getting a cup of coffee or whatever.

JAS: So you needed other ways to measure awe.

We also took physiological measures. We collected saliva, which we used for genotyping—but also hormones, both before and after the rafting trip.

Finally, we had a GoPro Suction Cup attached to each of the rafts looking back at the participants. We are currently behaviour-coding that for things like teamwork, and also emotion expression. Emotion has distinct expressive components, so facial expression that people make and the vocalisations they make with their voice indicate their inner state. We are coding the video for prototypical expressions of awe.

JAS: Linda, tell me about your experience rafting down the river.

Linda Saunders: It was awesome. It was tons of fun. I definitely feel that every time I am outdoors, with the sun shining down, with good company, doing something physical, being out in the cooling water. You know, rafting isn’t something that everybody gets to do, so that activity alone is awesome. It’s those moments where all my senses are in play, I would definitely say it’s awe. I love it and I’m still amazed at how much I love it, which is why I am going again this summer.

JAS: Did you know that you were being studied?

LS: Oh, yeah.

JAS: Craig, what are your most significant findings to date?

CA: Well, we have over 100 hours of this behavioral footage that we’ve been coding all academic year. We are not quite finished yet. So far, we are finding that the emotions people report are mapping onto the hormones that we measured, which is definitely cool.

We are finding that across the board participants report that they’re getting along better with their family and friends, they are feeling more connected to their community— all those things we would call social well-being.

We are also seeing a decrease in self-reported PTSD symptoms, which we measure in both adolescents we’ve studied and in the military veterans. The adolescents we take out on these rafting trips are from underserved communities in the Bay Area. Many of them actually exhibit PTSD symptoms as well. For both groups, we see a decrease in self-reported PTSD and also stress levels, and people are saying that they are sleeping better as well.

I should mention that this wasn’t an experiment in the technical sense. There wasn’t a control group, there wasn’t random assignment, but we are scaling this research up. That’s where we want to get eventually, and when we have those experiments we can start to make claims about causality. In the meantime, these findings are very encouraging.

Linda, I’m curious. If you hear me talk about PTSD symptoms and stress levels getting better, do you buy that? Or is rafting just a fun thing you do and that’s kind of it? Do our findings so far fit in with your experience or that of your fellow veterans?

LS: Yeah. So, good question. I won’t talk too much about myself but I have been learning about PTSD a lot. There is a wide range of PTSD symptoms and causes, so it’s really such a broad term. On the rafting trip, everyone was happy at the end and glad to take a break and talk about it and share the fun time we just had. I don’t necessarily see the long-term effects, other than maybe the encouragement to go again, just to feel that positive temporary time. I think if anything, it is a good distraction even from any of the milder symptoms.

JAS: Craig, why do you think awe evolved as an emotion? What could be its adaptive purpose?

CA: Well, Dacher is taken by this idea that awe helps people fold into a social collective. The idea is that the primordial form of awe involve feeling awe for a powerful leader that then helped people fold into a collective and work together better as a group. Now, I think that’s true and we have people from the lab, like Paul Piff, that published papers on how awe promotes pro-social behaviour.

But the angle that I’ve taken with my studies—we are still working on trying to get this published—is that awe promotes curiosity. When we are faced with things that blow our minds, things we don’t fully understand, we want to learn more. And you can imagine, in the evolutionary scope of things, that people would feel awe as they look out over a valley or something, and that feeling might make them more likely to explore and gain, for example, more food resources.

I should note that curiosity also explains the pro-social findings. It turns out that people who are more curious get along better with other people. So its not that these accounts are mutually exclusive. But I really think it’s about the curiosity.

JAS: I definitely felt awe the first time I saw a big city, when I was a kid—that might have even been the first time I felt awe. I was like, “Wow, look at these huge buildings and all the people.” I was intensely curious about cities, and I still am. Now that I’m old, I’ve often experienced awe through my own kids.

LS: Right. I think you see things again that you didn’t really remember were there.

JAS: Yeah, that’s right. But my kids are 11 and 12 now, so they are starting to get unhappy about everything and complain about too much hiking, in cities or nature.

LS: I’m trying to brainwash mine right now to continue loving nature. Ha!

JAS: Good luck!

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