Eliciting Awe in the Spectator: The Case of a Dhrupad-Based Dance Performance

This paper describes “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” an immersive Dhrupad-based dance installation designed to elicit feelings of awe in the spectators, in a real-life artistic context. This study used a mixed-methods approach in order to explore spectators’ awe experience (N=45), using specific scales and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results suggested that “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” with its combination of nature motifs and the slow dance-walk associated with the Dhrupad music in the choreography, was able to produce awe-related moments in some spectators and inspire a degree of positive emotions. Our qualitative results viewed awe explicitly as a positive emotion and showed that generally the spectator narratives, involving the whole performance, were based on modified states of consciousness. Three themes emerged: the main theme is “A rich experience of modified states of consciousness” involving the whole performance, and two interconnected sub-themes “Captivated by the slowness of the dancers” associated with the slow movement and “I can still hear the mantra in my head” in rapport with Dhrupad music. This study was carried out as part of the Canadian FRQSC/FCI Project (2019-RC2-260306)

Eliciting Awe in the Spectator: The Case of a Dhrupad-Based Dance Performance

This paper describes “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” an immersive Dhrupad-based dance installation designed to elicit feelings of awe in the spectators, in a real-life artistic context. This study used a mixed-methods approach in order to explore spectators’ awe experience (N=45), using specific scales and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results suggested that “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” with its combination of nature motifs and the slow dance-walk associated with the Dhrupad music in the choreography, was able to produce awe-related moments in some spectators and inspire a degree of positive emotions. Our qualitative results viewed awe explicitly as a positive emotion and showed that generally the spectator narratives, involving the whole performance, were based on modified states of consciousness. Three themes emerged: the main theme is “A rich experience of modified states of consciousness” involving the whole performance, and two interconnected sub-themes “Captivated by the slowness of the dancers” associated with the slow movement and “I can still hear the mantra in my head” in rapport with Dhrupad music. This study was carried out as part of the Canadian FRQSC/FCI Project (2019-RC2-260306)

Those who love nature are never alone:Designing digital nature to improve social wellbeing amongst older adults

This dissertation testifies to the potential of using digital nature as a complimentary strategy when interactions with outdoor nature become increasingly scarce and difficult due to ageing. Results of a series of studies, including a rapid literature review, a laboratory experiment with lifelike projections, several surveys among (future) older adults, focus group and interview sessions within care centres with frail older adults, demonstrate the beneficial effects of digital nature on several social wellbeing measures. Findings of this dissertation contribute to the evidence base regarding nature interaction and its impact on social wellbeing by pinpointing design considerations for digital nature content and by indicating how preferences vary with the level of dependence and mobility restrictions. Furthermore, these findings shed light on essential nature characteristics and warrant further research and development of digital nature applications for inspiring social connectedness, reducing feelings of loneliness and enhancing overall wellbeing.<br/

Are You Awed Yet? How Virtual Reality Gives Us Awe and Goose Bumps

“Awe” is a category of emotion within the spectrum of self-transcendent experiences. Awe has wellness benefits, with feelings of social interconnectivity and increased life satisfaction. However, awe experiences remain rare in our everyday lives, and rarer in lab environments. We posit that Virtual Reality (VR) may help to make self-transcendent and potentially transformative experiences of awe more accessible to individuals. Here, we investigated how interactive VR as a positive technology may elicit awe, and how features of aesthetic beauty/scale, familiarity, and personalization (self-selection of travel destinations) may induce awe. In this mixed-methods study, participants used an interactive VR system to explore Earth from ground and orbit. We collected: introspective interviews and self-report questionnaires with participants’ experience of awe; information on personality traits and gender; and we recorded physiological goose bumps on the skin (using an arm-mounted goose bump camera instrument), which is a documented marker of an awe experience. Results showed that on a scale of 0–100 for self-reported awe, four different interactive VR environments yielded an average awe rating of 79.7, indicating that interactive VR can indeed induce awe. 43.8% of participants experienced goose bumps: awe ratings positively correlated with the occurrence of goose bumps with those who experienced goose bumps having showed significantly higher ratings of awe than those who did not. Most (64%) of the goose bumps occurred when participants self-selected their VR environment. Participant statements from the interviews were characteristic of an awe-inspiring experience, revealed themes of social connection, and usability problems with the VR interface. Personality traits yielded no clear correlation to awe ratings, and females appear to experience more goose bumps than males. In summary: (1) Interactive VR can elicit awe, especially within familiar, self-selected environments; (2) Physiological goose bumps can be recorded to provide reliable, non-intrusive indications of awe; (3) Care must be taken to design interaction interfaces that do not impede awe; and (4) While personality traits are not correlated to awe ratings, goose bumps were experienced more frequently among females. We aim to conduct future studies using custom VR environments, interfaces, and additional physiological measures to provide further insight into awe

Space—A Virtual Frontier: How to Design and Evaluate a Virtual Reality Experience of the Overview Effect

A select small group of people have an amazing opportunity to see the Earth from a unique perspective—from space. The effect this experience has on an individual has been described as extraordinary and profound, consisting of a cognitive shift in worldview that leads to a deeper understanding of the fragility and vulnerability of our planet, and an increased feeling of connectedness. This experience, termed the “Overview Effect,” has been reported by many space-travelers. Its key outcome—an enhanced feeling of interconnectedness—contributes to both one’s well-being and the sense of responsibility for the Earth. If this profoundly positive experience could be made accessible to more people than just space-travelers, this might ultimately contribute to a healthier and more caring society, where more individuals deeply feel the interconnection of all living beings and responsibility for our collective future. Given virtual reality (VR) technology’s potential to induce experiences affecting an immersant in a similar way as a real experience, we see an opportunity to leverage this technology to attempt to elicit the Overview Effect as a virtual experience. Through a virtual installation, the experience could be made accessible to people around the world, and for researchers to study this otherwise rare phenomenon. This article builds the case for VR as a tool for inducing and studying the Overview Effect. It reviews the psychological research on the Overview Effect and awe, and proposes guidelines for: (1) the design of VR experiences to elicit an Overview Effect and (2) evaluation methods for assessing if, or to what degree, the experience was achieved. Finally, we discuss existing implementations of the Overview Effect in VR. Thus, we are making an applied contribution in the form of design guidelines, and contributions to knowledge in the form of a review of research related to the Overview Effect. We invite researchers and VR creators to utilize and expand on the guidelines proposed in this paper to design transformative VR experiences that induce positive change, and promote a feeling of connectedness and care for each other, and our Spaceship Earth

Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study

Awe is a little-studied emotion with a great transformative potential. Therefore, the interest towards the study of awe’s underlying mechanisms has been increased. Specifically, researchers have been interested in how to reproduce intense feelings of awe within laboratory conditions. It has been proposed that the use of Virtual Reality (VR) could be an effective way to induce awe in controlled experimental settings, thanks to its ability of providing participants with a sense of “presence”, that is, the subjective feeling of being displaced in another physical or imaginary place. However, the potential of VR as awe-inducing medium has not been fully tested yet. In the present study, we provided an evidence-based design and a validation of four immersive virtual environments (VEs) involving 36 participants in a within-subject design. Of these, three VEs were designed to induce awe, whereas the fourth VE was targeted as an emotionally-neutral stimulus. Participants self-reported the extent to which they felt awe, general affect and sense of presence related to each environment. As expected, results showed that awe-VEs could induce significantly higher levels of awe and presence as compared to the neutral VE. Furthermore, these VEs induced significantly more positive than negative affect. These findings supported the potential of immersive VR for inducing awe and provide useful indications for the design of awe-inspiring virtual environments

Digital wonders: examining awe-inspiring virtual reality as a tool to promote curiosity and exploration

Awe is a sense of enormity that alludes comprehension. Because of awe's properties as a knowledge emotion, awe elicitors can increase awareness of knowledge gaps, boost scientific interest, and promote inquiry. However, the relationship between awe and exploratory behavior, such as information seeking, remains unclear. Using a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation asks how and to what extent awe fosters information seeking. This question was examined through a two-pronged approach. First, in a laboratory setting, participants (n = 32) were exposed to a variety of awe elicitors through a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display. Participants' quantitative and qualitative responses were gathered immediately after exposure in the laboratory as well as 24 hours later through questionnaires. Second, a stratified sample of participants who voluntarily conducted information seeking (n = 8) completed phenomenologicallyinformed interviews. Findings indicate that although awe is primarily experiential, information seeking may arise from surprising learners with unknown and unexplained phenomena. Additionally, feelings of perceptual envelopment and accessing the inaccessible characterized participants' VR-based awe experiences. From a practical perspective, these findings suggest that simulating moments of discovery during travel may increase learners' intrinsic motivations for formal and informal research. Emergent findings also reveal that creating awe-inspiring VR content may require reduced didactic information to generate feelings of presence. From a theoretical perspective, this study pushes empirical awe literature beyond the confines of laboratory settings, illustrates how understudied awe elicitors pique curiosity, and provides a nuanced, qualitative report on the phenomenon of virtually-induced awe.Includes bibliographical references

Empirical and modelling approaches to the psychology of musical awe

The experience of awe is one that we may all recognise, the feeling of being overwhelmed by a great force and often inspired from its presence. Research from various disciplines has recently taken an interest in understanding and explaining this phenomenon through psychological models guided by the extensive philosophical discourse on the sublime. This research project, through its seven studies, takes some of the first steps to validate and test these psychological models through participant-based experiences of awe evoked from music, known as ‘musical awe’. Studies 1 and 2 examined first-hand accounts of musical awe, and found commonalities in experiences, associated judgements, and emotional sentiments through a mixed methods approach. Studies 3, 4, and 5 used the Musical Awe Corpus (MAC)—a collection of music excerpts from experiences of musical awe in Study 1—to examine shared musical associations and categorical groupings through online psychometric scale experiments. Study 6 investigated the relationship between judgements of size and associations of musical awe through a time-series, virtual object manipulation task. Lastly, Study 7 used music information retrieval techniques to extract and analyse musical features from the MAC to assess which features are prevalent and important to awe-associate music. Taken together, the findings of these studies advance a general characterisation of musical awe as an emotional phenomenon best understood as shared between two valenced-differentiated groups. The more common group is associated with positive valence and emotions of joy and wonder, whilst the other group is associated with threat and fear. However, both groups of musical awe show strong associations with size and power. Sonically, awe-related music, especially the negative valenced group, can be characterised by high levels of brightness, roughness, and extensive changes in spectral qualities. In conclusion, these studies largely support much of the theoretical grounding concerning the production and occurrence of awe, and from these findings, a novel empirically driven model was created to expand and improve our understanding of musical awe

Spatial cognitive implications of user interfaces in virtual reality and route guidance

The relationship between spatial learning and technology is becoming more intimately intertwined. This dissertation explores that relationship with multiple technologies and multiple types of spatial knowledge. With virtual reality, teleporting is commonly used to explore large-scale virtual environments when users are limited by the tracked physical space. Past work has shown that locomotion interfaces such as teleporting have spatial cognitive costs associated with the lack of accompanying self-motion cues for small-to-medium scale movement in virtual environments, but less is known about whether the spatial cognitive costs extend to learning a large-scale virtual environment. Experiment 1 (Chapter 2) evaluates whether rotational self-motion cues teleporting interfaces impact spatial learning for large-scale virtual environments. using two measures of survey learning (an object-to-object pointing task and map drawing task). Results indicate that access to rotational self-motion cues when teleporting led to more accurate survey representations of large-scale virtual environments. Therefore, virtual reality developers should strongly consider the benefits of rotational self-motion cues when creating locomotion interfaces. For Experiments 2 and 3 (Chapter 3), previous work has demonstrated that repeatedly using GPS route guidance reliably diminishes route learning. Memory research has shown that recalling information (i.e., testing) significantly improves retention of that information when compared to restudying the same information. Similarly, memory retrieval of routes during learning may be advantageous for long-term retention compared to following route guidance using a GPS. However, whether such a benefit would occur for route learning is not clear because the benefits of testing have primarily been explored with verbal materials. Experiments 2 and 3 explore whether retrieving routes from memory during learning enhance route knowledge of a large-scale virtual city using a driving simulator compared to learning a route by repeatedly following GPS route guidance. Results from both experiments demonstrated that there was no difference in performance between testing and repeatedly following route guidance at final test, but further analysis revealed that in the testing condition, a large proportion of errors produced during learning was also repeated at final test. The experiments described here not only expand the current knowledge regarding the intersection of technology and spatial learning, but also underscore the importance of evaluating applications of spatial cognitive theory across a range of applied domains