What is it about?
Awe is an emotion that people feel in the presence of things that are vast that transcend understanding. People often feel awe in nature. Across two contexts---a white-water rafting trip and people's daily lives---we found that the awe that people felt in nature in turn predicted well-being benefits such as happiness and stress. Importantly, other positive emotions such as joy did not show this pattern.
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Why is it important?
While there is ample evidence that nature is good for us, we still don't understand why this is the case. Our work suggests that it is nature's power to inspire awe that at least partially explains these effects. Our work is the first to identify a mechanism of nature's benefits that operates across different contexts, suggesting the effect of awe on well-being generalizes to many different kinds of nature experiences, and is not specific just to the contexts examined in the current work.
Perspectives
This work is important to me because it shows how nature can be used to improve the well-being of groups of people who typically lack the access to mental health resources that they need, such as military veterans and youth from under served communities. It's my hope that this work will motivate more research that furthers our understanding of the benefits of nature experiences, especially with those populations. The long-term goal is that nature recreation will be used formally by our health care system as a way to improve people's well-being.
Craig Anderson
University of California, San Francisco
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Awe in nature heals: Evidence from military veterans, at-risk youth, and college students., Emotion, June 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/emo0000442.
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