Wisdom, Self-transcendent Emotions (Compassion, Gratitude, and Awe), and Life Satisfaction: The Role of Awe of God and Connectedness.

Abstract

self-transcendent emotions like compassion, gratitude, and awe, can encourage individuals to transcend their own momentary needs and desires and focus on those of another. These emotions help solve three key social problems—caretaking, cooperation, and group coordination. However, there has been little research on one of the strongest religious emotions—awe of God and whether it differs significantly from the awe that arises outside the context of religion. Moreover, how self-transcendent emotions and awe of God interplay in explaining life satisfaction and pro-sociality is still an open question. For this, we propose a theoretical framework, explaining how self-transcendent emotions improve life satisfaction. In this regard, we modified the Krause & Hayward (2015) model to include Self-transcendent emotions. We hypothesized that self-transcendent emotions like compassion, gratitude, and awe along with practical wisdom, increase the awe of God. This would in turn increase connectedness with others (pro-sociality) through the sense of oneness with God. Increased connectedness would ultimately lead to Life satisfaction. Empirical validity was established by conducting a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. Data was collected from 400 respondents and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The result suggested that Awe, compassion, and gratitude have a positive and significant effect on Awe of God, and the Feeling of connectedness with others, however, their effect on life satisfaction remained insignificant. On the other hand, practical wisdom seems to increase life satisfaction, however, remained insignificant in explaining others. Awe of God seems to positively affect life satisfaction directly as well as indirectly through connectedness. Hence, there is a strong mediation effect of Awe of God, as well as a further mediation by Connectedness in explaining the effect of all three Self-Transcendent Emotions on life satisfaction. Awe of God, as well as Connectedness, also directly mediate the impact of Self-Transcendent Emotions on Life Satisfaction. Hence, this study is a novel attempt to implant the self-transcendent emotion in a wider latent – variable model that restrain diverse hypotheses.