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.

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

Threat-awe, a negatively valenced variant of awe, is thought to strengthen social ties among community members. However, few empirical studies have examined the social functions of threat-awe. This study investigated whether threat-awe is linked to interdependent worldviews through feelings of powerlessness in comparison with positive awe. After remembering and describing their experiences of positive-or threat-awe, 486 Japanese participants reported on items regarding a small self, a sense of powerlessness, and interdependent worldviews. The results demonstrated that threat-awe encouraged interdependent worldviews via an increased sense of powerlessness, rather than the small self, compared to the positive awe condition. From textual perspectives, the semantic networks between awe-related and other words differed from the descriptions of threat-awe and positive awe experiences. These results provide a more nuanced understanding of the emotions of awe as well as new insights into human cooperation in the context of disasters.

Neural representations of awe: Distinguishing common and distinct neural mechanisms.

Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend one's current frames of reference. The psychological form and function of awe differ between two types: positive-awe, which arises from perceptually aesthetic experiences (e.g., the beauty of nature, spiritual experiences, or the virtue of a leader), and threat-awe, which is triggered by threatening stimuli (e.g., natural disasters, wrathful god, or a leader's coercive charisma). Here, using functional MRI, we investigated common and distinct neural responses to experiences of positive- and threat-awe, elicited by watching awe-inspiring videos. We found that both awe experiences deactivated the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) in contrast to control conditions (positive-awe vs. amusement; threat-awe vs. fear), which suggest that awe experiences generally involve the "schema liberation" process since the left MTG plays a critical role in matching existing schema to events. In addition, positive-awe was associated with increased functional connectivity between the MTG and the anterior/posterior cingulate cortex, which are associated with the aesthetic reward process, and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), which is involved in the self-other representation. Threat-awe was associated with increased functional connectivity between the MTG and amygdala, which detects and processes threat stimuli, as well as between the amygdala and SMG. These findings suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying the complex psychological processes of awe vary as a function of the type of awe. The implications of these results regarding our understanding of the neural basis of awe and the future directions of human social cognition research are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Awe liberates the feeling that "my body is mine".

Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend one's current frames of reference. Previous research indicated that awe promotes a smaller self, which led to the creation of a small-self hypothesis. Thus, we shed new light on this hypothesis in terms of sense of body ownership using a rubber hand illusion experiment; through it, we showed that awe evokes an increased sense of body ownership over the rubber hand and this effect was prominent among participants who experienced small self. Our findings suggest that awe might provoke a "liberation of the self" in terms of a sense of body ownership as awe has been thought to liberate existing schemas, hence informing the demonstrable implications of the psychological mechanisms of awe.