Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Katie Dale, and I’m an assistant professor at Florida State University, and I do have a great job. I get to research positive media psychology and self-transcendent emotions, which includes awe. Now, when I told my parents that I would be speaking at a session about awe, my dad said, that’s awesome, right? Which is notable for two reasons. One is it’s just an A plus dad joke, right? But two, because anyone who’s been out to eat with my dad recently has probably heard the following interaction. So the server comes to the table and says, what would you like to drink? And my dad says, diet coke, please. And the server says, awesome. And then the server leaves and my dad says, awesome. Really? My ordering a diet coke was awesome? That’s not awesome. So my dad’s aversion to this use of the word awe isn’t because he’s against slang terms or anything like that, but rather because he believes that we should reserve the use of the word awesome for things that are truly awe-inspiring. So when we talk about awe and awesome things, what are we talking about? And what happens when we experience this emotion? Today, I’m going to talk about the effects and the elicitors of awe and what might happen when we encounter these things in the media. awe is an emotion and it’s one that Keltner and Haidt describe as being on the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear. So awe is, it has these two key characteristics. The first is that the stimuli is vast and the second is that it requires accommodation. Now this vastness can be physical vastness like stars in the night sky, but it can also be a perceptual vastness, something that is really far outside of our frame of reference out of what we’ve experienced before. And when we have these awe-inspiring experiences, these frames of reference need to expand and this expansion can feel enlightening. So when we stand outside in the night sky under so many tens of thousands of stars that we feel overwhelmed and we feel small, this is awe. I recently experienced awe when I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s OVO. So the entire show was incredible. But the part at which I literally gasped out loud and said, what? No, was when a contortionist came on stage and did this. So she was pushing the boundaries of what I thought the human body was capable of so far past my understanding that I had to adjust that understanding. I had to accommodate this new example of something that a human body could do. So what happens when we feel awe? What happens when we have these mind-blowing experiences? Well, research says that experiencing awe can make us more willing to help other people. It can make us less impatient. It can make us more satisfied with our own lives. It can even, by bringing us into the present, make us experience time differently. It can make us feel like we have more time, which that’s great, right? We should all go out and experience as much awe as we possibly can. Go to the Grand Canyon, stand at the edge, soak in the glory of it and feel small next to it. Visit the Taj Mahal or Westminster Abbey, marvel at the architecture and the size of it. If we do, research says we will be better for it. But the problem is that this isn’t feasible for everybody. So what we’re looking into and what we’re researching is the extent to which people can have these experiences as a result of consuming media. So several years ago, a team of researchers and I set out to explore the content and the effects of inspirational media. Now, in this case, we were looking at TV shows, movies, New York Times articles, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, a very broad definition of media. And what we were looking for were elicitors of self-transcendent emotions. Now, these emotions are emotions that take us outside of ourselves. And awe is one of these emotions. Some of the things that are thought to elicit awe include skill or talent, like the Cirque du Soleil performer, vastness like the night sky, art, music, architecture like the Taj Mahal, or nature like the Grand Canyon. Now, this project was difficult because the elicitors of awe are idiosyncratic. What evokes awe in one person might not elicit the same emotion in another. So I can actually pretty much guarantee that there’s at least a few people in the audience today who saw the photo of the Cirque performer and thought, eh, I mean, it’s interesting, but it’s not mind-blowing. So we had to be very careful not to determine these elicitors based on what we personally felt would elicit awe or self-transcendent emotions. We also had to allow for the possibility that a lot of things might inspire awe at the same time. So for instance, in this particular video, which was about a man who goes out and carves these incredibly large and artistically ornate sandstone caves, just for the joy of it, we saw a number of elicitors at the same time. Here we saw vastness, we saw architecture, art, skill, and nature all in the same video. So what we found was that the elicitors of self-transcendent emotions appear commonly in inspirational media. But notably, the elicitors associated with awe and hope appeared the most frequently. So what’s interesting about content analysis is that it can’t actually tell us about the effects of this content. It can only help us to describe what is showing up in this content. So we did a follow-up study. We had people come into a lab and watch inspiring media content, and they had a little dial, and they would turn the dial up when they were feeling inspired and back down when they weren’t feeling inspired. So if you were taking part in this study today, you may have turned the dial up when you saw the Grand Canyon, if that image inspired you, and then back down when you saw something that you found less inspiring. So when we analyzed our results, we found that when there were elicitors of awe on screen in these inspirational videos, people did turn their dials up, meaning that it was these elicitors that was driving inspiration from these videos. So what does all of this mean? First of all, it tells us that elicitors of self-transcendent emotions are common in inspirational media. Second, research tells us that we can experience awe as a result of media exposure, which is counter to the dominant narrative that we’re all used to hearing about media, that media is terrible for us, that it’s making us more violent people, or that it’s having these horrible effects on us. Yes, there is good, respectable, excellent research that says that media can have negative effects. But positive media psychology is also finding that media can have these positive effects as well, that we can experience awe and hope and admiration as a result of media exposure. Now, I talked about how awe-inspiring experiences can make us more willing to help other people, it can make us feel more satisfied with our own lives. And the possibility that we can experience this as a result of media is, well, awesome. So there’s still a lot that we don’t know about the way that this works, about the way that we experience awe as a result of media exposure. But we’re starting to understand that these kinds of positive media experiences can have positive, personal, and social outcomes. I greatly appreciate your time today. I hope that you all have an awesome conference, not in the sense of I hope you have just a good time, but rather in the awe-inspiring way that my dad would approve of. Thank you very much.