Draw some awesome : the effect of art and awe on grief and giving

Draw Some Awesome: The Effect of Art and Awe on Grief and Giving Jamie Katz Committee members: Crystal Hoyt, Scott Allison, Kristin Bezio Prior research has shown that awe can have positive psychological effects on people who experience it. We conducted two experimental trials to test whether awe can be evoked by art and whether this art induced awe can increase people’s charitable donations and decrease their grief in the face of losing an important relationship. We concluded that spectacular videos of art production were significant evokers of awe compared to their mundane control counterparts. We also found that the awe videos increased charitable donations through a mediating variable of feeling the “presence of something greater than oneself. ” Lastly, we found that there was a significant interaction between experiencing awe and gender on grief. Men in the control condition reported significantly less grief than any other group of participants, suggesting that the awe video intervention has the power to increase grief reports for men. ART, AWE, GRIEF, AND GIVING Chapter 1: Introduction Imagine a clear day, and you’re on a mountaintop looking out over a sweeping landscape that reaches farther than the eye can see. You feel small and insignificant in comparison to the vast beauty of the natural landscape. You start to wonder how the peaks came to form such magnificent shapes all around you, and your worries about your to-do list and the hustle and bustle of your daily responsibilities melt away. A feeling of awe connects you to something bigger than yourself and your petty thoughts seem to pale in comparison to the grandiose scenery. This awesome phenomenon has been a trending topic of study in modern day psychology. Awe is a powerful emotion that can create lasting impacts on the brain, and researchers are still discovering the outcomes that result from experiencing awe. Awe is defined by Miriam Webster’s dictionary as “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime” (“Awe | Definition of Awe by Merriam-Webster,” 2018). Awe is a bi-directional emotion, meaning that it can have positive or negative valence, that has remarkable influence on the human mind (Lichtenberg, 2015). Quintessentially, awe can be broken down into two unique parts: perceived vastness and mental accommodation. Awe has the potential to create permanent changes in the way a person experiences the world from that point forward. To evoke feelings of awe in a controlled, scientific setting could be a helpful step in creating mental health interventions. Psychological Effects of Experiencing Awe: An Overview Awe can be experienced in a number of different ways and elicited by myriad different things. Keltner and Haidt (2003) sorted awe elicitors into five different categories: threat, beauty, ability, virtue, and supernatural causality. One can imagine experiences in his or her life that have evoked awe and pretty easily place them into one or more of these categories. For example, the mountain scene described above would mainly fall into the beauty category but could also be ART, AWE, GRIEF, AND GIVING perceived as a supernatural act of some higher being depending on the viewer’s beliefs. Someone’s extraordinary ability to do a task can be awe-inspiring when it requires mental accommodation. For example, someone who is an extremely talented singer would likely elicit admiration, whereas someone who seems to defy gravity with their dance skills would elicit awe. Scientists can use these known categories of awe to produce fabricated awe experiences in a controlled environment like a lab or an online forum. A fair amount of literature exists surrounding awe and the effects that it might have on people that are experiencing it. Many articles look at how sensing awe makes the subject feel other connected emotions or inclinations. For example, Stellar et al. (2018) found that feelings of awe implied more frequent feelings of humility. These humbled people in turn changed their behavior in certain scenarios to be more generous and group-focused. In addition, there is research connecting awe and perception of sense of time left to live (Rudd et al., 2012). This concept is especially interesting in different age groups. An older adult’s sense of time left to live has important implications for other behaviors like socio-emotional selectivity and emotional regulation in general (Carstenson, 2006). Another effect from feeling awe could be increased levels of self-concept and greater ability to connect oneself to the greater world (Piff et al., 2015). This in turn puts things into perspective and could allow the subject to experience more freedom and greater wellbeing. Some research suggests that awe is meant to be experienced as a group emotion, and its function is to bond human beings to one another (Piff & Keltner, 2015). If this hypothesis is true, it could explain some of the other effects of awe like increased inclinations for pro-social behavior. Many experiments have found that when people are put in situations in which they experience awe, they are more likely to volunteer their time or donate money to charities (Sliwa, 2015). This goes along with the group-emotion hypothesis because it is a tangible demonstration ART, AWE, GRIEF, AND GIVING of people being more concerned for group needs than individual needs. Awe can also be a spiritual experience, and spiritual experiences are also seen as good psychological coping mechanisms with significant improvements to wellbeing (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). When experienced in a positive way, awe can have many beneficial and healthy outcomes on an individual’s life. Awe can be a mediating factor for feelings of humility, small-self, and connectedness (among other things) which in-turn can promote prosocial behaviors and healthier states of mind. Awe Buffering Loss In a study done by Koh et al. (2017), researchers looked at the effects of awe on feelings of loss. Participants were told to describe their favorite possession in enough detail that the researchers could picture its appearance and its significance. They were then randomly assigned to either the awe condition where they watched clips of sweeping ocean landscapes from BBC’s Planet Earth or a control condition where they were shown videos of marine life. Next, they were told to imagine their possession that was described earlier got lost, stolen, or destroyed. They rated their feelings of loss and unhappiness in a following survey, and the results between two groups were compared. The awe group had significantly reduced feelings of loss and unhappiness as compared to the control group. This study showed that experiencing awe can have buffering effects on feelings of loss surrounding a physical object. The researchers hypothesized that this effect was a result of the power that awe has to focus people on larger, more abstract connectedness rather than valuing material goods. Our study takes the basic principle of using awe as a buffer to negative outcomes that Koh et al. (2017) discovered, but we attempt to expand the phenomenon and apply awe’s buffering powers to relationship loss rather than material loss. We predicted that awe would be able to lessen the negative outcomes of losing a relationship because it was an effective buffer in the ART, AWE, GRIEF, AND GIVING face of possession loss and monetary loss that participants imagined in a laboratory setting. Relationships are often lost suddenly as a result of illness, injury, and distance, and losing a special person in one’s life can create much emotional stress, damage, and vulnerability. In their experiment, Koh et al. (2017) asked the participants to describe their most valued possession, but we asked our participants to describe a relationship that is extremely close and valuable to them. They described this relationship and the nature of it in enough detail that we can understand and can picture the intimacy and origin of it. They were then placed in either the awe condition or the control condition and asked to report their feelings, emotions, and reactions to losing this relationship afterwards. Another important difference is that our study takes place entirely online, and our participants will be Amazon Turk users rather than people who physically enter a laboratory setting. Our study looks to replicate the same basic buffering principle of awe that Koh and colleagues discovered, but we will expand on it in new and applicable ways in the realm of relationships. Inducing Awe Through Art We explored whether watching videos of people creating extraordinary art can evoke awe in viewers. In the research world, awe is an established emotion that is mostly elicited by vast nature scenes in controlled settings. We first and foremost set out to see if viewing art videos had the same effect as viewing clips from BBC’s Planet Earth to extend the methodology for evoking awe in a laboratory setting. Many times, creating art is more accessible than visiting spectacular places in nature. Viewing a piece of artwork can inspire awe for different reasons. Its subject matter can be extremely beautiful aesthetically, or it could contain subject matter that seems supernatural such as grandiose mountains, enhanced scenery, or vast outer space depictions. Alternatively, art can invoke awe because of the human talent it required in its creation. Research has shown that people feel awe when in the presence of human greatness or ART, AWE, GRIEF, AND GIVING extreme talent. We hope to show that viewing our selected art clips significantly evokes awe as opposed to other positive emotions like joy, gratitude, and amusement. We use short clips of people creating outstanding and interesting works of art to evoke awe in viewers, and we hypothesize the exceptional human skill demonstrated will conjure feelings of awe that require mental accommodati