Awe liberates the feeling that “my body is mine”

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Awe
• small self
• rubber hand illusion
• body ownership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We used amusement as a general positive emotion for the following reasons: Amusement has been used in previous studies as a general positive emotion with which to contrast the effects of awe (e.g., Valdesolo & Graham, 2014). In addition, amusement has similar characteristics to awe in that it is elicited by an incongruity between one’s expectations and actual experience (Piff et al., 2015).

2 We administered the small self scale after the RHI task to minimise the durations after watching a video.

3 There were no significant effects of emotion condition on pre-locations in the synchronous condition, F (2, 78) = 1.04, ${\eta }_p^2$ = 0.03, p = .350.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research and JSPS Fellows – KAKENHI – (JSPS KAKENHI Grant 19J20942) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.