Awe and Instagram

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I called this blog Beauty and Madness because I intended to write not just about politics and academics, but also about art, as the mood struck. The mood has struck.

I went for a four-hour walk and took a lot of pictures with my phone. I posted them via social media by way of Instagram. As is my habit, I made liberal use of Instagram's photo-editing features before posting - not the preset filters, but the custom tools, the sliders and so forth. I liked the results but, as usual, I felt a little guilty about the manipulation.

This got me thinking. Not only do the shots look a lot better with the touch-up, but I feel that they capture what I am seeing better than the untouched photo. They make visible in reproduction the details and impacts that caused me to take the picture in the first place. What's going on here?


A Thing for Sunsets

Anybody who has known me for a long time knows that I have a thing for sunsets. They give me the same feeling a lot of people get when they see the moon illusion (pictured) - a sort of feeling of stilled expansiveness. I once summarized it by saying that when I see one, I hear music. This isn't literally true, but there is some truth to it: I get almost exactly the same feeling when I listen to music. I have always felt a little weird about it.

I get the sense that I am not unusual in the experience, but perhaps I feel it more strongly than most. Perhaps there is some kind of personalized pop-psychological explanation. I grew up in very rainy environments, surrounded by mountains. When I was young, sky-blazing sunsets were few and far between. So, maybe the first few (over a lake in Michigan) really sank in. Or, maybe everybody gets the same thing and they just don't talk about it because it's embarrassing. I don't know.

As you might have guessed, what I feel has a name: awe. I had not realized until writing this that, although I have done a lot of reading on the psychology of emotions, I have never seen awe discussed in depth. Consequent to this realization I got about doing a little light reading on the subject, which led me to this article from Observer magazine, published by the Association for Psychological Science (a more science-y association of psychologists than the APA). The Observer article had a bibliography, and the single best thing about being in grad school is that I have access to the entire UC Berkeley library system online. Basically every article ever published is available in full text after a few clicks. It's amazing.

Vastness and the Need for Accommodation

So, curious, I read Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17, 297–314. It was really enlightening and I think it's worth quoting extensively. It begins:

In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear is a little studied emotion - awe. Awe is felt about diverse events and objects, from waterfalls to childbirth to scenes of devastation. Awe is central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art. Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways. Yet the field of emotion research is almost silent with respect to awe. Few emotion theorists consider awe in their taxonomies and those who do have done little to differentiate it from other states.

Wow! I think anyone interested in the experience of art ought to be paying attention.

The next part of the article reviews past non-academic literature on the subject of awe. They start with religion: not just Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus (~33 CE), but one of my personal favorites, Arjuna's vision of the cosmos in the Bhagavad Gita (ca. 4th century BCE). They move into sociological descriptions of charismatic leadership in the aesthetic philosophy of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757); into psychology, including Maslow's (of hierarchy fame) research on "peak experiences" (a path toward self-actualization, naturally). It's good stuff.

Keltner & Haidt then set out a framework for thinking about awe:

We propose that two features form the heart of prototypical cases of awe: vastness, and accommodation. Vastness refers to anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self's ordinary level of experience or frame of reference. Vastness is often a matter of simple physical size, but it can also involve social size such as fame, authority, or prestige. Signs of vastness such as loud sounds or shaking ground, and symbolic markers of vast size such as a lavish office can also trigger the sense that one is in the presence of something vast. In most cases vastness and power are highly correlated, so we could have chosen to focus on power, but we have chosen the more perceptually oriented term "vastness" to capture the many aesthetic cases of awe in which power does not seem to be at work.

Accommodation refers to the Piagetian process of adjusting mental structures that cannot assimilate a new experience (Piaget & Inhelder, 1966/1969). The concept of accommodation brings together many insights about awe, such as that it involves confusion (St. Paul) and obscurity (Burke), and that it is heightened in times of crisis, when extant traditions and knowledge structures do not suffice (Weber). We propose that prototypical awe involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast. Such experiences can be disorienting and even frightening, as in the cases of Arjuna and St. Paul, since they make the self feel small, powerless, and confused. They also often involve feelings of enlightenment and even rebirth, when mental structures expand to accommodate truths never before known. . . .

Emotional experiences that involve perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, whether in response to a charismatic leader, a grand vista, or a symphony, are members of the awe family.

Vastness and a need for accommodation. It's so whatever that it doesn't quite make sense.

Later, they move into the territory of art and nature.

Perhaps the most common experience of awe for contemporary Westerners in egalitarian societies is the response to natural and human-made objects. People feel awe in response to large natural objects, such as mountains, vistas, storms, and oceans. People also feel awe in response to objects with infinite repetition, as Burke suggested, including fractals, waves, and patterns in nature. . . .

As in religious conversion (Spilka, Hood, & Gorsuch, 1985) and peak experiences (Maslow, 1964), nature-produced awe involves a diminished self, the giving way of previous conceptual distinctions (e.g., between master and servant) and the sensed presence of a higher power. Here again, our prototype of awe proves useful. Natural objects that are vast in relation to the self (e.g., vistas, waterfalls, redwoods) are more likely to produce awe, as are natural events that have effects upon many (e.g., tornadoes, earthquakes). Again accommodation plays a role: Natural objects that transcend one's previous knowledge are more likely to produce awe than are familiar objects.
. . .

Songs, symphonies, movies, plays, and paintings move people, and even change the way they look at the world. The same can be true of human creations, such as skyscrapers, cathedrals, stadiums, large dams, or even oddities, such as the world's largest ball of string. When do art and human creation elicit awe? First, size matters. Awe is more likely to occur in response to viewing art or artifact when the object is larger than the viewer is accustomed to seeing. The object itself may be large (e.g., Michaelangelo's David), or it may exemplify powerful or heroic forces and figures (as in Greek myths). In more subtle ways, art can produce awe by rendering exceptional moments in time that are signs of vast, powerful forces, as when seemingly trivial events foreshadow larger developments in the narrative. When art has these properties it should be more likely to produce awe, as opposed to, for example, aesthetic pleasure. Accommodation also matters, and to the extent that an object or scene is not easily assimilated awe becomes more likely. Art and literature often present highly unusual or even magical and impossible events. Art can engage the spectator in a novel way of viewing things (e.g,. Monet's water lilies; Virginia Woolf's prose). When the form and meaning of a work of art are familiar and easily graspable, the work may be entertaining, but it is unlikely to be considered great art. Works that challenge and that involve obscurity are more likely to induce awe.

They also note that moments of grand comprehension of theories (psychoanalysis, feminism, evolutionary theory) can elicit similar feeling. They go on to argue for a need for further research based on the predictions of their model.

I guess I don't need to struggle to explain what I perceive in music or sunsets any more.

Awe-Dispositional

Still, am I over-awed? To think about this, I read Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept. Cognition and Emotion, 21, 944–963.While they report on four studies - including one that found that awe was not generally social (unlike happiness) - the really interesting one, to me, was Study 3:

The results of Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated the information-focused, self-diminishing nature of awe in the context of specific awe experiences. What implications does this have for dispositionally awe-prone people? How do awe-prone people think about the world and about themselves?

Wait, there are "dispositionally awe-prone people?" This is nice to know. A little digging took me to Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & John, O. J. (2006). Positive emotion dispositions differentially associated with Big Five personality and attachment style. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 61 71. In that study, they administered a survey and found strong relationships between self-reported experiences of awe and self-reported Openness to Experience (one of the Big Five personality traits). I have taken Big Five surveys and always score high on OtE. Interestingly, awe-proneness is correlated to extraversion, but much less strongly than most other positive emotions. Where my other ambiverts at?

Anyway, what happens when you take awe-prone people and throw this crazy world at them?

First, if the experience of awe does promote accommodative, stimulus-driven cognition, then awe-prone people should be more comfortable revising their own schemas, and creating new ones when necessary. Although we are not aware of a regularly used self-report measure of this trait, there is an excellent measure of its inverse: Need for Cognitive Closure. Individuals high on Need for Cognitive Closure are uncomfortable with ambiguity, prefer continuity in their surroundings and in what is expected of them, and dislike situations that do not have a ‘‘correct’’ answer or response. Thus, we expected Need for Cognitive Closure to correlate negatively with dispositional awe-proneness. However, we did not expect Need for Cognitive Closure to predict dispositional experience of joy and pride.

In brief, they gathered up 88 undergraduates at a "large, West Coast university" (three guesses which one!), and administered a battery of self-reporting surveys - the "Awe, Joy, and Pride scales of the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scales (Shiota et al., 2006)"; "short form of the Need for Closure scale (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996)"; and a "Twenty Statements Test (TST; Rees & Nicholson, 1991)" coded for physical, reflective, social, and oceanic (along three lines - individuated, universal, and other) responses.

Their results:

Numbers reported are correlation coefficients (r squared). Some pretty strong relationships between awe and openness at levels of statistical significance if the threshold is cranked down a little bit. Their discussion:

In Study 3, dispositional experience of the emotion awe was associated with low Need for Cognitive Closure. This supports our hypothesis, derived from Keltner and Haidt’s (2003) proposed definition of awe, that awe-prone individuals should be especially comfortable revising their own mental structures, or acknowledging that currently held mental structures are not adequate to the occasion. This effect cannot be attributed to general effects of positive emotion, since Need for Cognitive Closure was not associated with dispositional Joy or Pride.

Also as hypothesised, dispositional awe-proneness was associated with greater representation of ‘‘universals’’, or statements about membership in very large categories, in participants’ self-concepts. All three positive emotion dispositions were associated with greater representation of Oceanic self-descriptors in the self-concept, but for dispositional Joy and Pride this was due exclusively to statements about being special or unique. It appears that only dispositional awe-proneness facilitates definition of the self as part of something greater than the self.

I can't tell you how useful the ability to hold black and white in mind at the same time can be, as an attorney. Gray shades and hard choices.

This research definitely suffers from the WEIRD error - the study participants are undergrads from the researchers' schools - Western, educated, from industrialized, rich, and democratic nations. Since many of the study participants are around 19 years old, I'd add young to that list. It also relies on self-reporting from people who might have already been socially primed to describe their feelings in a manner that supported the studies' conclusions. Finally, I cannot express judgment on the soundness of the surveys underlying the statistics, but I won't just trust them. All the same, there seems to be a little bit of signal here.

What interests me most is the concept of awe-prone individuals, and the idea that the experience of awe is somehow related to comfort with ambiguity, complexity, and the gray. I certainly think this is true.

The Root of Skepticism

Finally, I read Griskevicius, V., Shiota, M. N., & Neufeld, S. L. (2010). Influence of different positive emotions on persuasion processing: A functional evolutionary approach. Emotion, 10, 190–206. doi: 10/1037/a0018421. They summarize a great deal of work on the relationship between mood and decision making. A grumpy mood makes people better critical thinkers - ahem, lawyers:

negative affect appears to facilitate central, systematic, or deep processing; people in this state are more likely to scrutinize incoming information, and less likely to base their judgments on simplifying heuristics. Sad moods, for example, lead people to be less reliant on scripts and stereotypes, less likely to commit the fundamental attribution error, and less susceptible to halo effects.

It also has been demonstrated that people in good moods are easier to win over in argument, simply by giving them a lot of reasons, regardless of the quality of those reasons. But things get a lot more complicated when one moves beyond "happy" and "sad" into the complex range of experience. Griskevicius et al. decided to look at how things worked following the experience of six specific emotions: "anticipatory enthusiasm, contentment, attachment love, nurturant love, amusement, and awe." They asked their undergrads to sit down and write:

Please try to recall an event in your life when you saw a particular panoramic view for the first time. Some examples might be seeing the Grand Canyon, seeing the view from high up on a mountain, or seeing the skyline of a big city for the first time. Please recall a specific event when you saw this view for the first time, rather than a general period of time.

They then exposed them to strong and weak arguments, and did some statistics. Their results:

In other words, the experience of many positive emotions results in greater favor toward weak arguments (compare black bar at neutral vs. amusement, contentment, etc.). But after experiencing awe, participants became much more skeptical of weak arguments. These results were replicated in a second study also reported in the article, and generally attributed to awe involving higher levels of cognitive processing (thinking about stuff) than the others.

Short version: awe makes you smarter. It also makes me very happy that so much of this research is being done by people at Berkeley.

Awesome

I am lucky enough to be living in Berkeley, California, close to a lot of hills that, when climbed, provide a view of the San Francisco Bay. Time it right, and there are sunsets (daily!). The view I experience through my own eyes triggers in me a powerful feeling of awe - the huge lines of light in clouds, the fractalized complexity of water and air, the color. I never, ever get tired of going up there, looking at things, and taking pictures.

I am self-conscious, however, about how I'm taking the pictures. I have never gotten into photography, which I have always found to be unremittingly fussy and pretentious. I just want to document and sometimes share the pretty things I see, as freely and easily as possible. Enter the iPhone. It has a camera and I take it with me everywhere. It takes pictures. But those pictures are often flat and uninteresting. Where is the awe I see?

Enter Instagram. It lets me adjust the fundamental aspects of the digital photograph in a manner that brings out the things I really notice. I am especially fond of the "structure" tool, which is some secret proprietary mixture of contrast and sharpen. But there are plenty of other things to fiddle with as well, and I regularly find myself using adjust (to straighten and frame), brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation (another favorite), and shadow. I also sometimes drop in a very subtle radial tilt shift, or, sparingly, vignette shading. I try to be tasteful. I also enjoy just zooming in on small details in the photos - I find the pixelation to abstract the image in a way that reminds me of watercolor or pointillism.

Enter filter shame. There appears to be a massive online conversation among photo people about whether or not Instagram filtering is the harbinger of the end of civilization as we know it, or simply in very bad taste. The criticism is mostly pointed at the preset filters, and not these tools, but the judgment is there. Should I feel it?

No.

Having done the reading described above, I have found reasons to continue doing the thing I already enjoy doing, but now while feeling better about it. That was my purpose all along, probably. What I experience when I see the world is awe, as described. The walls really come down when I'm getting a lot of exercise, and the view at the top is more amazing for it. I try to capture it, and the detail is a little lost - but now I have a way to bring the detail back. If the result is hyperreal, it is because what I was experiencing when I took the photo was as well. All is right in the world.

Now if only I could find a way to do that with music.

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