Coping With Everyday Stressors: The Effects of Awe

In times of stress, people often turn to spirituality, religion, or interacting with the natural world as a way to cope. These methods of coping may have benefits, such as social support during religious observance or relaxation while hiking in a forest. However, these coping strategies also share an unstudied element that may affect how well people cope with stress: the experience of awe. Awe is an emotion that comes from being in the presence of something so large or vast that it is difficult to make sense of it. An example is being immersed in a grand natural scene. This project aims to understand when and why awe helps people to cope better with stressful situations faced in everyday life, such as test taking, public speaking, or experiencing physical discomfort. Understanding the role of awe in effective coping can help to identify relatively simple techniques that people can use to help themselves rise to the occasion during something stressful rather than be overwhelmed by it. This project centers on the idea that awe makes people feel like they and their concerns are small in comparison to whatever induced that sense of awe. The specific nature of this experience should have important, and possibly contradictory, effects on coping with stress. If something that inspires awe makes a stressful situation seem negligible in comparison, that stressful situation should seem more manageable to cope with. In contrast, if something that inspires awe makes one's own capabilities seem insignificant, the stressful situation should seem less manageable. A set of studies assess personality characteristics and experimentally create psychological states that should make these types of focus during awe more versus less likely. Multiple methods will be used to study these effects, including measurements of bodily responses and behavior. This will allow tests of awe's effects on people's psychological experience as stress happens and on behaviors that can be self-destructive in the context of facing difficulties. The long-term goal of the research is to achieve a deeper understanding of when and why awe helps people cope with everyday stressors. Understanding simple ways to foster positive responses to everyday stressors can enhance resilience in people's lives, thereby improving well-being. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.