Elicited Awe Decreases Aggression

Awe is a feeling of wonder and amazement in response to experiencing something so vast that it transcends one's current frames of reference. Across three experiments ( N = 557), we tested the inhibition effect of awe on aggression. We used a narrative recall task paradigm (Studies 1 and 2) and a video (Study 3) to induce the emotion of awe. After inducing awe, we first examined participants’ emotion and their sense of ‘small self’, and then the...