Authors: Willow Norton, Kaleb Cox, Jaycen Sunderman, Jessalyn Warhurt
Mentors: Kirsten L. Graham
Insitution: Southern Utah University
Positive awe is a feeling of wonder, insignificance, reverence, etc., that is stimulated by man-made or natural events, objects, or circumstances. Monroy & Keltner list the five primary domains of awe as nature, spiritual engagement, music, dance, and psychedelics, but a scale determining the exact origin points of awe has not yet been developed. Upon researching awe more and determining that it is a universally felt emotion, we started looking at where awe may stem from, or what causes it. We have found that there are different types of awe, or that different populations may be able to feel it differently, but we could not find a measure of where it originates. In our study, we attempted to determine the sources from which people experience positive awe by developing the Positive Awe Origin Scale (PA-OS). While developing the PA-OS, we delivered our scale to five peers who tested the face value of our scale about readability and subject matter, and we then edited our scale based on the feedback we received. In the present study, participants will be recruited through social media and MTurk to complete an online survey, via Qualtrics. This survey will include likert scale items rated 1 to 5, with 1 being “strongly disagree” and 5 being “strongly agree.” Psychometric evaluation of results will include a confirmatory factor analysis and an internal consistency measure using Cronbach’s alpha. Discriminant validity will be measured as we correlate our scores with other, unrelated, scales included in the Qualtrics survey, which measure different constructs. Convergent validity will be measured as participants complete an awe subscale of the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES). We anticipate that the PA-OS will help further identify the various sources of awe and lead to improvements in the research.