Stop making sense?

Epistemic emotions, like awe and wonder, involve a recognition that one can neither understand nor exert meaningful control over one's environment. While researchers and writers have emphasized the beneficial consequences of such states, their potentially destructive consequences have been underexamined. The conditions under which these states promote individual well-being and societal flourishing must be specified.

Beyond oneself: the ethics and psychology of awe.

Awe and wonder appear to be powerful emotions that can inform and shape our attitudes toward ourselves and others, especially in relation to the larger meaning and purpose of our lives. What are the psychological underpinnings of these universal emotions? How does awe, for example, relate to self-knowledge, and more generally to understanding the enigmatic contradictions of human nature? Is it possible to cultivate and develop this emotion as an ethical incentive in our relationships with others? Are awe and wonder capable of awakening and engendering moral transformation? Does the emotion of awe lie at the root of the religious impulse in humans? and Is there any room left for a sense of the miraculous in today's increasingly scientific and secular world? Professor of religious studies Lisa Sideris joins psychologists Jennifer Stellar and Piercarlo Valdesolo to explore how awe shapes our perspectives and views on everything from science to morality.

The paradox of power: The relationship between self-esteem and gratitude.

In contrast to earlier research, the three studies reported here find that the most powerful individuals are also the most grateful, and that self-esteem plays a role in explaining this relationship. Study 1a ( = 109) reveals a strong, positive relationship between individuals' perceived power and gratitude. Study 1b ( = 194) replicates this and finds that self-esteem mediates this positive power-gratitude relationship.

Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence.

Across five experiments, we show that dehumanization-the act of perceiving victims as not completely human-increases instrumental, but not moral, violence. In attitude surveys, ascribing reduced capacities for cognitive, experiential, and emotional states to victims predicted support for practices where victims are harmed to achieve instrumental goals, including sweatshop labor, animal experimentation, and drone strikes that result in civilian casualties, but not practices where harm is perceived as morally righteous, including capital punishment, killing in war, and drone strikes that kill terrorists. In vignette experiments, using dehumanizing compared with humanizing language increased participants' willingness to harm strangers for money, but not participants' willingness to harm strangers for their immoral behavior.

Awe and scientific explanation.

Past research has established a relationship between awe and explanatory frameworks, such as religion. We extend this work, showing (a) the effects of awe on a separate source of explanation: attitudes toward science, and (b) how the effects of awe on attitudes toward scientific explanations depend on individual differences in theism. Across 3 studies, we find consistent support that awe decreases the perceived explanatory power of science for the theistic (Study 1 and 2) and mixed support that awe affects attitudes toward scientific explanations for the nontheistic (Study 3).

Emotion and decision making.

A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices.

Awe, uncertainty, and agency detection.

Across five studies, we found that awe increases both supernatural belief (Studies 1, 2, and 5) and intentional-pattern perception (Studies 3 and 4)-two phenomena that have been linked to agency detection, or the tendency to interpret events as the consequence of intentional and purpose-driven agents. Effects were both directly and conceptually replicated, and mediational analyses revealed that these effects were driven by the influence of awe on tolerance for uncertainty. Experiences of awe decreased tolerance for uncertainty, which, in turn, increased the tendency to believe in nonhuman agents and to perceive human agency in random events.

Synchrony and the social tuning of compassion.

Although evidence has suggested that synchronized movement can foster cooperation, the ability of synchrony to increase costly altruism and to operate as a function of emotional mechanisms remains unexplored. We predicted that synchrony, due to an ability to elicit low-level appraisals of similarity, would enhance a basic compassionate response toward victims of moral transgressions and thereby increase subsequent costly helping behavior on their behalf. Using a manipulation of rhythmic synchrony, we show that synchronous others are not only perceived to be more similar to oneself but also evoke more compassion and altruistic behavior than asynchronous others experiencing the same plight.

Jealousy and the threatened self: getting to the heart of the green-eyed monster.

Several theories specifying the causes of jealousy have been put forth in the past few decades. Firm support for any proposed theory, however, has been limited by the difficulties inherent in inducing jealousy and examining any proposed mediating mechanisms in real time. In support of a theory of jealousy centering on threats to the self-system, 2 experiments are presented that address these past limitations and argue for a model based on context-induced variability in self-evaluation.