Emotion Of Awe Research Articles

Understanding pro-environmental behavior in tourism: Developing an experimental model

Reducing tourism-related damage to the destination environment and enhancing tourists' pro-environmental behavior are important for tourist destinations. As an important factor in consumers' pro-environmental behaviors (PEB), the emotion of awe has attracted increasing attention in tourism research. This study investigates the relationship between tourists' experience of awe and their pro-environmental behavioral intentions (measured by high and low effort PEB) (Study 1, 2), as well as their actual PEB (measured by charitable donation) (Study 3), and how this relationship is mediated (moderated) by connectedness to nature (tourist destination) in China. The results demonstrated a positive correlation between awe, connectedness to nature, and pro-environmental behavioral intention (Study 1). Connectedness to nature mediates the relationship between awe experience and pro-environmental behavioral intention (Study 2). Meanwhile, tourists report different feelings of awe and pro-environmental behavior for different types of tourism destinations. Specifically, the indirect impact of awe experience in religious scenic spots on tourists’ pro-environmental behavior was greater than that in natural scenic spots (Study 3). Finally, the comprehensive framework developed here can be implemented by destination managers and tourism operators to improve the competitiveness of the Chinese tourist destinations.

Awe motivates authentic-self pursuit via self-transcendence: Implications for prosociality.

We propose that the emotion of awe (i.e., challenge that exceeds the scope of one's mental structures, requiring cognitive accommodation) awakens self-transcendence (i.e., reaching beyond one's self-boundary), which in turn invigorates pursuit of the authentic self (i.e., alignment with one's true self). This process has implications for prosociality. We supported our theoretical model in 14 studies (N = 4,438) using distinct awe manipulations or measures, employing different assessments of authentic-self pursuit, testing participants both in laboratory and field settings, and involving samples from both collectivistic and individualistic cultures. In Studies 1-2 (N = 828), dispositional awe was positively associated with authentic-self pursuit and induced awe motivated authentic-self pursuit. In Studies 2-9 (N = 2,461), dispositional awe was positively associated with, and induced awe strengthened, authentic-self pursuit via self-transcendence. These effects were independent of pride and happiness. In Study 10 (N = 281), self-smallness (i.e., a sense of self as small and insignificant), albeit induced by awe, did not account for the unique effects of awe on authentic-self pursuit via self-transcendence. 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional Appeal of Science Fiction Cinema: In Awe of Interstellar

Science fiction has almost become the modern-day mythology, and compared to literature, it is a genre that attracts masses of people in the field of cinema. The ‘sublime,’ which is identified as one of the attractive aspects of science fiction literature, is a philosophical and aesthetic concept with a wide semantic variation associated with greatness, power and limitlessness. The expression of the sublime in cinema creates an emotion of ‘awe.’ Awe as a complex emotion is being increasingly explored in theoretical and empirical studies in recent years. In this study, the emotion of awe is examined on the example of Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014). The film has distinctive depictions of the sublime and it suggests two distinguishing features of awe (i.e., vastness and a need for accommodation) by treating various aspects of science fiction themes and by its affective qualities. It has been concluded that awe as a cinematic emotion is the emotional core of Interstellar. The film embodies the operational structure of awe.

Does awe facilitate conformity in tourism consumption? Evidence from China

ABSTRACT Although conformity is frequently used to increase the appeal of popular tourism products, research on the drivers of tourist conformity is limited. Using laboratory experiments conducted in China, we demonstrate that the emotion of awe, which is often experienced while traveling but seldom investigated in the tourism literature, may have a novel influence on tourist conformity that has been overlooked so far. We conducted three studies using different manipulation methods and tourism purchase scenarios to provide convergent evidence that participants who experience awe (vs. neutral states) prefer majority-endorsed tourism-related products over minority-endorsed ones. Moreover, the effect of awe on conformity is partly mediated by social connectedness. Our findings shed light on the emotional determinants of tourist conformity, enrich research on the consequences of awe, and have useful managerial implications for tourism practices in terms of guiding consumer conformity by managing tourists’ emotional experiences.

The Role of Implicit Theories in Motivating Donations in Response to Threat-Based Awe

The present research investigates how charitable giving in response to threat-based awe, an emotional experience that typically accompanies disaster-relief campaigns, is likely to depend on consumers’ implicit theories. Although consumers want to behave prosocially when experiencing threat-based awe, due to the presence of threats, such behavior depends on whether they believe that their donations have sufficient efficacy. Consequently, in response to threat-based awe, consumers holding an incremental (vs. entity) theory perceive greater efficacy for their donations, which subsequently increases their charitable giving. These predictions are tested across five experimental studies. The findings of this research contribute to the literature on implicit theories and the emotion of awe and offer a more nuanced approach to how different consumers may be motivated to engage in charitable giving in the context of natural disasters.

“The Awe is In the Process”: The nature and impact of professional scientists' experiences of awe

AbstractIn recent years, there has been a call in the research for greater attention to the role of affect in science learning and practice. Awe, which is characterized in the literature as an emotion that facilitates learning and motivates an orientation toward something larger than the self, appears frequently in scientists' descriptions of their work. Empirical evidence also suggests that awe has a unique relationship with scientific reasoning. However, this evidence comes primarily from tightly controlled laboratory research, a methodology that limits our ability to investigate more authentic manifestations of awe and any lingering effects that may extend beyond the initial moment of experience. This study, a qualitative analysis of interviews with professional scientists (n = 30), advances our understanding of the conditions that are likely to elicit awe in the context of scientific practice as well as the perceived impact of those experiences. For study participants, the emotion of awe was deeply connected to the process of learning and to personal moments of discovery. Scientists described their awe experiences as contributing to shifts in their perspective or worldview, including a greater appreciation for the vastness and complexity of the universe. In addition, participants reported that awe served as an important source of motivation for their continued pursuit of the work. The findings indicate that authentic inquiry and metacognition, which we already recognize as critical pedagogical practices for encouraging scientific reasoning, are just as valuable for helping students to experience the affective dimensions of the discipline.

Awe: Efeitos Cognitivos, Emocionais e Motivacionais do Deslumbramento num Contexto Experimental

Resumo A relativamente inexplorada emoção de awe, que pode ser descrita em português como a sensação de deslumbramento e transcendência perante a percepção subjetiva de grandiosidade, vem sendo experimentalmente associada a efeitos positivos de natureza diversa. Nos artigos encontrados para inclusão nesta revisão bibliográfica, foram relatados um aumento da pró-socialidade e de sentimentos afiliativos, melhoras no humor e na satisfação pessoal, e modificações na concepção dos participantes acerca do tempo, levando a uma redução da impaciência e incentivando a busca de experiências de crescimento pessoal em lugar de recompensas imediatas. Esse sentimento também pareceu encorajar o senso crítico com relação a tentativas de convencimento, além de promover a espiritualidade e a identificação de propósito na realidade.

Nature can get it out of your mind: The rumination reducing effects of contact with nature and the mediating role of awe and mood

Evidence has been found that contact with nature may reduce rumination in healthy individuals living in urban environments. This paper aims at i) testing whether one may replicate previous findings using a shorter duration of nature exposure, and ii) explore the possibility that a shift in attention away from self (notably induced by the emotion of awe), leading to mood restoration, may mediate such nature-rumination relationship.We showed that a walk as short as 30-min in an urban park significantly reduced ruminative thinking in healthy participants, whereas a 30-min walk along a city transect devoid from natural elements did not. Also, we showed that the “walk in nature” significantly reduced negative mood and elicited more awe and more externally oriented thoughts than the “walk in city”. Our mediation analysis did not show any direct effect of contact with nature on rumination levels. Instead, it showed that the more awe participants experienced while walking, the more negative affect was reduced, which then lead to reduced rumination. Also, our mediation analysis showed that nature can affect rumination via mood improvement only and irrespective of awe.This study adds to previous research supporting the so-called “psychological ecosystem services” and calls for additional efforts aimed at exploring the extent to, and mechanism(s), by which contact with nature may affect rumination, notably in clinical populations.

Beyond oneself: the ethics and psychology of awe.

Awe and wonder appear to be powerful emotions that can inform and shape our attitudes toward ourselves and others, especially in relation to the larger meaning and purpose of our lives. What are the psychological underpinnings of these universal emotions? How does awe, for example, relate to self-knowledge, and more generally to understanding the enigmatic contradictions of human nature? Is it possible to cultivate and develop this emotion as an ethical incentive in our relationships with others? Are awe and wonder capable of awakening and engendering moral transformation? Does the emotion of awe lie at the root of the religious impulse in humans? and Is there any room left for a sense of the miraculous in today's increasingly scientific and secular world? Professor of religious studies Lisa Sideris joins psychologists Jennifer Stellar and Piercarlo Valdesolo to explore how awe shapes our perspectives and views on everything from science to morality.

The power of beauty? The interactive effects of awe and online reviews on purchase intentions

Prior research has established that online consumer reviews can have significant influences on the evaluations of a product or a service. In particular, studies show that negative (vs. positive) reviews lead to unfavorable evaluations because they heighten purchase risk. The present research seeks to examine a contextual cue that can alleviate this potential problem. Across three studies, this research demonstrates how the emotion of awe – elicited by a beautiful product in the advertisement – can reduce the perception of purchase risk, leading to favorable consumer evaluations of a product or service even though it has negative reviews. The implications of this research are beneficial for advertisers by highlighting the potentials of eliciting awe (e.g., by utilizing beauty) in their advertisements.

The Awe-some Argument for Pantheism

Many pantheists have claimed that their view of the divine is motivated by a kind of spiritual experience. In this paper, I articulate a novel argument, inspired by recent work on moral exemplarism, that gives voice to this kind of motivation for pantheism. The argument is based on two claims about the emotion of awe, each of which is defended primarily via critical engagement with empirical research on the emotion. I also illustrate how this pathway to pantheism offers pantheists distinctive resources for responding to persistent objections to their view, and how it might lead to more exotic views incorporating pantheistic elements.

Inspired to Create: Awe Enhances Openness to Learning and the Desire for Experiential Creation

Automated fabrication, home services, and premade goods pervade the modern consumer landscape. Against this backdrop, this research explores how the emotion of awe might motivate a consumer to partake instead in experiential creation (i.e., activities in which they actively produce an outcome) by enhancing their willingness to learn. Across eight experiments, experiencing awe (vs. happiness, excitement, pride, amusement, or neutrality) increases people’s likelihood of choosing an experiential creation gift (vs. one not involving experiential creation), willingness to pay for experiential creation products (vs. comparable ready-made products), likelihood of creating a bespoke snack (vs. taking a premade one), preference for experiential creation solutions (vs. solutions without experiential creation), likelihood of purchasing a product when it is framed as high (vs. low) in experiential creation, preference for high (vs. low) experiential creation meals, and likelihood of creating a knickknack (vs. taking a premade one). This greater desire for experiential creation is mediated by openness to learning and moderated by the need for closure. These findings, relevant for firms encouraging creation-oriented products and behaviors, offer fresh insights for engaging consumers.

The Potential of Virtual Reality for the Investigation of Awe.

The emotion of awe is characterized by the perception of vastness and a need for accommodation, which can include a positive and/or negative valence. While a number of studies have successfully manipulated this emotion, the issue of how to elicit particularly intense awe experiences in laboratory settings remains. We suggest that virtual reality (VR) is a particularly effective mood induction tool for eliciting awe. VR provides three key assets for improving awe. First, VR provides users with immersive and ecological yet controlled environments that can elicit a sense of “presence,” the subjective experience of “being there” in a simulated reality. Further, VR can be used to generate complex, vast stimuli, which can target specific theoretical facets of awe. Finally, VR allows for convenient tracking of participants’ behavior and physiological responses, allowing for more integrated assessment of emotional experience. 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.

Awe: An Aristotelian Analysis of a non-Aristotelian Virtuous Emotion

While interest in the emotion of awe has surged in psychology (especially positive psychology), philosophers have yet to devote a single self-standing article to awe’s conceptual contours and moral standing. The present article aims to rectify this imbalance and begin to make up for the unwarranted philosophical neglect. In order to do so, awe is given the standard Aristotelian treatment to uncover its conceptual contours and moral relevance. Aristotelianism typically provides the most useful entry point to ‘size up’ any emotion – more problematically here, however, as Aristotle did not himself explicitly identify awe. The article critiques and proposes to improve upon existing psychological conceptual analyses of awe, probes the question why Aristotle ignored it and addresses an often-presumed link between awe and humility which bears on its moral status.

The Experimental Research on the Influence of Materialism and the Emotion of Awe on Life Satisfaction and Products Preference

The materialism plays a negative role in people’s life that if people have high materialism, normally they would show low life satisfaction and excessively pursue the material world but neglect the spiritual world. However, the emotion of awe, as a typical kind of positive emotions, can help people to raise their satisfaction in life and also promote people to approach the spiritual world. In this study, we used an experiment to investigate how the emotion of awe can offset against the negative impact from materialism on people. The results of the experiment indicated that if people experienced the awe emotion, no matter how high their materialism level were, they would increase their life satisfaction. And the people with high materialism would turn to prefer to the experience-based products when they acquired the emotion of awe.

The Emotion of Awe and Perception of Destination to Influence Tourists’ Satisfaction

This study aimed to explain tourist satisfaction by using an integrated model that incorporated cognitive and affective perspectives. Questionnaires data were collected from 385 participants in Tibet and the conceptual model was verified by using Structural Equation Modeling. The results showed that, from the cognitive viewpoint, the perception of the natural environment was the key factor to influence tourists’ satisfaction; from the affective viewpoint, both the perception of the natural environment and the perception of the religious atmosphere were the factors to influence tourists’ satisfaction. The perceived value of the destination (cognitive factor) and experience of the emotion of awe (affective factor) also influenced tourists’ satisfaction. Additionally, the findings of this study showed that the emotion of awe was the mediator between the perceived value of the destination and the tourists’ satisfaction. In a summary, this study presented a theoretical framework that was based on the dual perspectives of cognition and affection to expand the existing research and provided a comprehensive and reasonable interpretation of tourists’ satisfaction.

Exploring the social aspects of goose bumps and their role in awe and envy

Both awe and envy are emotions that can result from observing a powerful other, but awe should stabilize social hierarchies while envy should undermine them. Three studies explored how the physiological reaction of goose bumps might help in understanding these distinctive reactions to powerful others, as goose bumps should be associated with awe rather than envy. In Study 1, participants kept a four-week journal and made a detailed entry each time they experienced goose bumps. Goose bumps resulting from the emotion of awe were the second most frequently occurring type after reactions to cold. Consistent with understanding awe as an emotional reaction to powerful or superior others (Keltner and Haidt in Cogn Emot 17:297–314, 2003), many of these experiences had social triggers. In Study 2, accounts of goose bumps resulting from exposure to powerful or superior others contained greater awe than envy. Also, the intensity of goose bumps was positively correlated with awe and negatively correlated with envy. In Study 3, accounts of awe contained more goose bumps than accounts of envy, and goose bumps were positively correlated with awe.

Another Word on “God and the Twenty-First Century”

Another Word on “God and the Twenty-First Century”

The History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912–1962

HE year 1912 was a significant date in the history of the scientific study of religion. smile Durkheim published his Formes elmentaires de la vie religieuse and Wilhelm Schmidt finished the first volume of his monumental work, Ursprung der Gottesidee, which was to be completed only after forty years, with Vols. XI and XII appearing posthumously in 1954-55. Also in 1912, Raffaele Pettazzoni brought out his first important monograph, La religione primitiva in Sardegna, and C. G. Jung his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. Sigmund Freud was correcting the proofs of Totem und Tabu, to be issued in book form the following year. Four different approaches to the study of religion-none really new-were illustrated by these works: the sociological, the ethnological, the psychological, and the historical. The only new approach potentially, that of the phenomenology of religion, was not to be attempted for another ten years. But Freud, Jung, Durkheim and Wilhelm Schmidt did apply new methods and claimed to have obtained more enduring results than their predecessors. Significantly enough, with the exception of Pettazzoni, none of these men was a historian of religion. Nevertheless, their theories were to play a considerable role in the cultural life of the following decades. Though very few historians of religion have been exclusively dependent on them, Freud, Jung, Durkheim, and Schmidt, and especially the first two, have contributed highly to the Zeitgeist of the last generations and their interpretations of religion still enjoy a certain prestige among no pecialists. In the course of elaborating their hypothees, all these authors were reacting, positively r negatively, to their immediate predecessors or contemporaries. Around 1910-12, the German astral-mythological and pan-Babylonian schools were declining. From a rather abundant production,' only P. Ehrenre ch's Die allgemeine Mythologie und ih e ethnologischen Grundlagen (1910) an A. Jeremias' Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (1913; 2nd ed., 1929) r tained a certain value for the ensuing generations of scholars. The most important contributio s to the history of religions appear ng in Germany between 1900 and 1912 depended, directly or indirectly, on E. B. Tylor's theory of animism.2 But, as against the situation for the previous thirty years, this theory was no longer universally accepted. In 1900, R. R. Marett published his Preanimistic Religion, an article destined to b come famous, in which he tried to prove that the first stage of religion was not a universal belief in souls, but an emotion of awe and wonder aroused by the encounter with an impersonal power (mana).a A large number of scholars accepted and elaborated this theory. Mana (or orenda, wakan, and the like) became almost a cliche, and, in spite of criticism by competent ethnologists,4 it is still believed in many scientific circles to represent the primordial stage of religion. Another very popular pre-animistic hypothesis was brought forward by J. G. Frazer in his famous Golden Bough (2nd MIRCEA ELIADE, the celebrated historian and theorist, is Chairman of the Department of the History of Religions, University of Chicago, and co-editor, with Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long, of the recently-initiated journal, History of Religions.