The other day, I got fairly decisively lost while hiking in the French Pyrénées. Not seriously lost, since I had a functioning iPhone, and was never much more than an hour’s walk from a road where, in a crisis, I could doubtless have flagged down a grudging French motorist. (Is there any other kind?) But just lost enough to feel the first frisson of something like fear: enough to be reminded that mountain ranges are very large and solid things, whereas I am a tiny and fragile thing, and that it takes a vanishingly small amount of effort on the part of a mountain range to kill a human.

I say “something like fear”, incidentally, because the experience wasn’t wholly unpleasant: the frisson had a distinctly pleasurable component. Actually, there’s a word for this combination of terror, euphoria and smallness in the face of vastness, which constitutes the oddest and least understood of emotions: awe.

If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t need psychological research to convince you that you need more awe in your life: a trip to Yosemite or the Sheeps Head Peninsula, or merely watching the BBC’s Planet Earth or The Cave of Forgotten Dreams ought to do the trick. But here’s some psychological research for you anyway: according to work recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which I found via Smithsonian magazine, feeling awe in the face of overwhelming natural environments is associated with more “pro-social” behaviors of generosity and kindness.

In one part of the study, participants who spent time looking upwards at high eucalyptus trees were more likely to help a researcher who had dropped some equipment than were those who looked at a building. In another, watching clips from Planet Earth triggered more altruistic attitudes. “By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self”, researcher Paul Piff was quoted as saying, “awe may encourage people to forgo strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that awe has strange effects on us; after all, it’s a pretty strange phenomenon. The late psychologist Paul Pearsall – who did much to campaign for its recognition as an additional “official” emotion, alongside mainstream psychology’s accepted ones – noted that awe cannot be categorized as wholly negative or positive: the mixture of the two is fundamental. Relatedly, it isn’t provoked only by experiences we’d categorize as positive: glorious natural scenes prompt awe, but so can the recognition of mortality brought about by the diagnosis of a potentially fatal disease. Crucially, in the new study, pro-social attitudes were associated with awe felt in the presence of natural beauty and natural disasters. Both are vivid reminders of the smallness of the individual self.

Pearsall also coined my favorite neologism, “openture”, as the opposite of “closure” – a mindset of actively welcoming awe, of being committed to fully experiencing everything that can be experienced, not just life’s good bits. He even writes of experiencing awe, and of “feel[ing] more alive than I’ve ever felt”, after discovering the body of his adult son, who had killed himself.

I admit to feeling a little ambivalence about the burgeoning psychological research on awe – which, as Smithsonian magazine notes, has already been found to boost creativity, improve physical immunity and enhance the sense of having an abundance of time. Staunch supporter of scientific research though I am, I can’t help but feel a tension between awe itself – predicated on humility in the face of ungraspable vastness – and the attempt to pin that vastness down, to render it tame by understanding it.

I know many New Atheists disagree, taking this position to be tantamount to belief in supernatural forces. But to visit Yosemite, say, because you’ve heard it’ll make you happier or healthier or more creative is to get things back-to-front. The experience is its own justification.



That said, most of us spend much of our lives trying, in one way or another, to get the world under control, to make reality predictable and explicable and non-intimidating. So it probably can’t hurt to have researchers remind us of the vast emotional rewards that come from realizing we never will.

