Strengthened social ties in disasters: Threat-awe encourages interdependent worldviews via powerlessness

Relationships Between Meaning in Life and Positive and Negative Spirituality in a Field Setting in Japan

This study examined the relationships between positive/negative spirituality and meaning in life at two religious sites in Japan. Participants reported greater sadness and less meaning in life at Koyasan Okunoin, a temple with graves surrounded by nature, than at Nachi Kumano Taisha, a shrine with a waterfall. However, greater feelings of happiness protected meaning in life in the presence of sadness at Koyasan. Additionally, participants who felt a sense of awe reported greater meaning in life through self-liberation, regardless of the sites. The results provide new insights into meaning in life from the two sides of spirituality.

A closer look at the time course of bodily responses to awe experiences

The structure and function of awe have been examined by focusing on the average level of outcomes during awe experiences. In the present study, we tested the psychophysiological process of experiencing awe, focusing on time-series changes in skin conductance responses (SCRs), a moment-by-moment measure of sympathetic nervous responses, and pupil diameter, which is dilated or constricted through the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. The responses were measured through an experiment where 77 Japanese university students watched emotional (awe, amusement, or neutral) videos while moving a joystick when they felt supernatural agency or non-agency, examining the underlying psychological processes. We found that experiencing awe was associated with frequent and steep changes in SCRs and frequent changes in pupil diameter. The joystick inclination, the perceptions of the supernatural, was kept at a high level from the start to the end of awe experiences. These results may reflect the psychophysiological processes of awe: the "fluctuation" of the sympathetic nervous system might underlie awe-specific experiences. Our findings shed new light on the mechanisms of the body-mind interaction in awe experiences.

Development of a Japanese version of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A structural topic modeling approach

BACKGROUND

Awe, a complex emotion, arises in response to perceptually and conceptually vast stimuli that transcend one's current frames of reference, which is associated with subjective psychological phenomena, such as a sense of self and consciousness. This study aimed to develop a Japanese version of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S), a widely used questionnaire that robustly measured the state of awe, and simultaneously investigated how the multiple facets of awe related to the narrative representations of awe experiences.

METHODS

The Japanese AWE-S was created via back-translation and its factor structure and validity was investigated through an online survey in Japan.

RESULTS

The results revealed that the Japanese AWE-S consisted of the same six factors as the original (i.e., time, self-loss, connectedness, vastness, physiological, and accommodation) and had sufficient internal consistency, test-retest reliability, construct validity, and also Japan-specific characteristics. The structured topic modeling generated seven potential topics of the descriptions of awe experiences, which were differently associated with each factor of the Japanese AWE-S.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of awe and reveal the constructs of awe in Japan through cross-cultural comparisons. Furthermore, this study provides conceptual and methodological implications regarding studies on awe.