Awe: How Nature and Art Both Elicit a Sense of “the Sublime”

• Focusing on something bigger than oneself in nature can promote awe and positive emotions, according to research.
• Recently, researchers compared people's emotional responses after viewing an immersive video of a painting, "The Starry Night," and a modern-day video of the same location.
• Both videos elicited a sense of awe, but the video of the real location evoked feelings of fear and positive emotions that were more intense than the video of the painting.

Source: David Mark/Pixabay

"Breathtaking," "unbelievable," "OMG," and "wowzer!" are exclamations someone might use to describe aesthetic experiences in nature that elicit a sense of "the sublime" or being "gobsmacked by awe."

Centuries ago, philosophers started theorizing and debating how and why certain nature-based or creativity-based (e.g., architecture, poetry, art) stimulus elicits a sense of awe, a.k.a. "the sublime." For example, in ancient Greek times (circa 1st century AD), Longinus is credited with penning a treatise, On the Sublime, that explores the potential awesomeness of various human-made and naturally-occurring aesthetics.

In 1757, Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. "Burkean" theories of the sublime posit that experiencing awe-inducing sublimity in nature is more intense (and potentially fear-inducing) than simply witnessing objects of beauty in day-to-day life or something aesthetically pleasing in a museum because, hypothetically, nature-inspired sublimity has a God-like power to wow us but also destroy us.

Experiencing Awe Makes Us Feel Small

More recently, Dacher Keltner and colleagues at UC Berkeley's Social Interaction Lab and Greater Good Science Center have investigated modern-day elicitors of awe and how experiencing the sublime affects us.

As an example, in one study from a few years ago (Piff et al., 2015), a Berkeley-based team led by Paul Piff found that standing in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees near the school's campus made study participants feel smaller in a way that elicited three things: awe, the "small self," and prosocial behavior. (See "The Power of Awe: A Sense of Wonder Promotes Loving-Kindness")

Another recent study (Sturm et al., 2020) found that focusing on something "bigger than oneself" while walking in nature can promote awe and positive emotions.

Interestingly, first author Virginia Sturm, senior author Dacher Keltner, and their co-authors found that when older adults were prompted to actively "seek awe" before heading out for a 15-minute walk, they seemed to create a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually had more "wow!" moments than a control group that wasn't instructed to be on the lookout for nature-based stimuli that elicited awe.

Photographically, when the awe-struck study participants took smartphone selfies during their nature walks, they tended to have bigger smiles than their not-awe-struck counterparts; their photographs were also framed in a way that made their bodies look smaller (i.e., "small self") and magnified the vastness and novelty of various panoramic views in the background.

Nature vs. Art as Elicitors of the Sublime

Until recently, researchers hadn't looked at how a current-day photographic representation of "the sublime" in a 360º virtual-reality video compares to a computer-generated 360° recreation of the exact same location as represented in a famous work of art.

In a first-of-its-kind virtual reality study, Alice Chirico of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano in Italy and colleagues conducted a side-by-side comparison of how 50 study participants responded emotionally after viewing an immersive video of Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and a current-day photorealistic video of the exact same location (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France) depicted in Van Gogh's legendary en plein air painting from the summer of 1889.

These peer-reviewed findings (Chirico et al., 2021) were published on March 17 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The authors describe the premise of this research in their paper's introduction:

"Imagine first the most awe-inspiring natural scenery that you have ever seen, generally involving a grand and sweeping panorama. Then, imagine viewing a masterful painting of the same scene. One can imagine similarities and differences between one's reactions to these two scenes. Both the real natural scenery and the painting of it would likely display similar physical properties, such as apparent vastness, rarity, and novelty. These features are crucial for the emergence of a particular mental process traditionally called the sublime or (equivalently) sublimity or, in more recent years, awe. However, these scenes would differ, too, because one would know that one elicitor is real and the other is a representation. Does this distinction between 'real' and 'representation' matter when it comes to experiencing the sublime?"

"Statistical analysis of the participants' responses showed that both virtual-reality videos induced the sublime with similar intensity," the authors explain in a news release. "However, they differed with regards to certain sub-dimensions of the sublime. For instance, the nature-based video evoked a greater sense of vastness and a greater perception of existential danger."

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To give you a sense of what a totally immersive 360º "The Starry Night" VR experience feels like, check out this YouTube video:

Even though both (nature vs. art) virtual reality videos elicited similar awe-struck emotions of something sublime, Chirico et al. found that "the nature-based video evoked feelings of fear and positive affect that were of significantly higher intensity than those elicited by the art-based video." The researchers also found that "participants reported a greater sense of being present in the nature-based video than in the art-based one."

"By using virtual reality, we provided the first empirical contribution to the enduring debate about whether nature or instead art is better at evoking the experience of the sublime. We found that both nature and art are effective elicitors, although they exhibit different nuances," the authors conclude.