Abstract
The wilderness is one of the most widely recognized sources of transcendent emotion. Various recent studies have demonstrated nature’s power to induce intense emotions. The study at hand will generate conceptual and operational definitions of sublime emotion toward nature. Taking into consideration the recent research on feelings of awe, an instrument is devised to measure sublime emotion toward nature. The proposed scale’s reliability and validity is tested in a sample of 280 participants from the general population of Madrid. Results show that sublime emotion was defined by two conceptual components: awe, and inspiring energy, both obtained using the computer program FACTOR. After reliability and validity analysis, the Sublime Emotion toward Nature (SEN) scale included 18 items, distributed into awe (6 items, α = 0.881) and inspiring energy (12 items, α = 0.933). 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. The SEN is an adequate instrument to measure transcendent emotions provoked by direct wilderness exposure or memory thereof.
Highlights
In research on humans’ relationship to the natural world, spirituality is key to understanding people’s emotions and the meaning of nature to them (Fredrickson and Anderson, 1999). Stokols (1990) maintains that it is a central element of environmental experience
This study presents an instrument and a definition to measure spiritual responses elicited by nature, a particular transcendent emotions, that we propose to call sublime emotion toward nature
It is comprised of four factors (20 items in total) that together explain 52.3% of total variance: anthropocentrism (5 items, α = 0.705), environmental apathy (5 items, α = 0.902), emotional affinity toward nature (5 items, α = 0.845), and connectedness with nature (5 items, α = 0.850)
Summary
In research on humans’ relationship to the natural world, spirituality is key to understanding people’s emotions and the meaning of nature to them (Fredrickson and Anderson, 1999). Stokols (1990) maintains that it is a central element of environmental experience. Spirituality research has peaked in association with research on transcendent experiences (Levin and Steele, 2005; Yaden et al, 2017) in relation to wellbeing (Yaden et al, 2017), health (Levin and Steele, 2005), and other aspects. It has, further, opened up a specific line of research on feelings of awe, which researchers have undertaken experimentally (Piff et al, 2015) as well as phenomenologically (Bonner and Friedman, 2011), building on Keltner and Haidt (2003) pioneering contribution. They all emphasize that nature is a principal source for people to “experience a sense of spirituality”
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