Effects of awe on self-transcendence: A registered report study

Awe is typically elicited in response to perceptually vast stimuli and is often characterized by a reduced focus on the self and feeling small and insignificant. One key effect of awe is that it induces “self-transcendent experiences” (STEs), which involve two components: connectedness and self-loss. It is, however, not clear yet what determines whether the connectedness or self-loss component of STEs is most likely to occur in response to awe. Recently, awe has been classified into positive-awe and threatening-awe—depending on the type of elicitor, and we suggest that these different types of awe determine the relative strength of connectedness or self-loss. The current registered report presents two studies that investigated the effects of positive-awe and threatening-awe on connectedness and self-loss by inducing awe via (1) asking participants to recall and write about “positive-awe” or “threatening-awe” experiences (Experiment 1) and (2) presenting participants with a positive-awe or a threatening-awe inducing video (Experiment 2), with a neutral state as control condition in both experiments. We found that positive-awe resulted in stronger connectedness than threatening-awe, and both types of awe resulted in stronger connectedness compared to the neutral condition. In addition, we found that both types of awe resulted in stronger self-loss than the neutral condition. However, using a novel scale to distinguish between positive and negative self-loss, we did not find differences between positive-awe and threatening-awe on both positive and negative self-loss. The proposed studies lead to a better understanding of positive- and threatening-awe and their relation to self-transcendent experiences.