'Standing in Awe': The effects of awe on body perception and the relation with absorption

By M. Elk, Annika K. Karinen, Eva Specker, Eftychia Stamkou, Matthijs Baas. 2016

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The experience of awe is typically elicited in response to perceptually vast stimuli and is often characterized by feeling small and insignificant. In the present series of studies we aimed (1) to determine the effects of awe on body perception and (2) to elucidate the role of the personality trait of ‘absorption’ (i.e. the tendency to get fully immersed in one’s experiences) in relation to the feeling of awe. Across 4 different studies, involving both lab-based and field experiments, we found that feelings of awe are associated with smaller body size estimates. We also found that absorption is a strong predictor of feelings of awe: people scoring high on absorption tended to report overall stronger feelings of awe – irrespective of the experimental manipulation. In addition, experimentally manipulating absorption, by instructing participants to get fully absorbed in an external stimulus resulted in stronger feelings of awe. Thereby these findings illustrate that two key features underlying the experience of awe are changes in the perception of one’s body and a tendency to get absorbed in internal or external stimuli.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9730e764ecbc03cb3a17f9d5242f1b1d95594394

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Citations in the corpus

The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A multifactorial measure for a complex emotion (2018, background): “For example, on the level of the bodily self, awe can reduce the sense of one’s own body size (van Elk et al., 2016).”