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

Goose bumps are one of the most honest signals the human body produces — involuntary, unmistakable, and nearly impossible to fake. So if you wanted to know whether someone was genuinely experiencing awe, not just saying they were, you could watch their skin. That's exactly what Denise Quesnel and Bernhard Riecke did. They strapped a camera to people's forearms, put them in virtual reality, and sent them to space. Awe is not just being impressed. Researchers define it as a specific emotion with two core features: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation — meaning the experience is large enough that your existing mental framework has to stretch to contain it. Keltner and Haidt established this framing in two thousand three, and since then the wellness implications have accumulated. Awe is associated with social connectedness, increased prosociality, and improvements in life satisfaction. Physiologically, it links to a parasympathetic, tend-and-befriend response — calming rather than alerting. Astronauts describe it particularly vividly. Kathryn D. Sullivan, floating past six windows with a one hundred eighty-degree panorama of Earth below, said no amount of training prepares you for what that feels like. The problem is that awe is rare in everyday life and even rarer to produce reliably in a lab. Most studies lean on self-report, and self-report is retrospective — you ask people how they felt after the fact. What Quesnel and Riecke wanted was a way to catch awe as it happened, physiologically, and to test whether virtual reality could serve as a delivery mechanism for the real thing. Their argument for interactive virtual reality over passive video comes down to two things: agency and embodiment. When participants can move through a space, choose where to go, and orient their own viewpoint, the experience becomes self-relevant in a way that a pre-rendered video simply cannot match. The stimulus platform they chose was Google Earth virtual reality — a complete, high-resolution, stereoscopic three-dimensional model of Earth with real-time imagery. Crucially, at the time of the study it had been publicly available for exactly seven days. None of the sixteen participants had tried it. The study ran sixteen volunteers, with a mean age of twenty-seven, through four virtual reality environments in a fixed order, five minutes each. First, a non-interactive color tour featuring colorful landscapes — no controllers, just watching. Second, interactive Vancouver, chosen for local familiarity to ease navigation. Third, interactive Mount Everest, chosen for scale and unfamiliarity. Fourth, a self-selected destination where each participant could go anywhere on Earth — home city, family landmarks, anywhere — with full freedom to explore along the ground or orbit the planet entirely. All environments were delivered on a two thousand sixteen HTC Vive headset with noise-canceling headphones and a spatial audio score. The physiological measurement was the study's most distinctive contribution. Quesnel and Riecke developed an arm-mounted goose bump recorder instrument, adapted from earlier work by Benedek and colleagues. A Logitech webcam, modified for macro recording, captured a five-centimeter patch of forearm skin. Three LEDs positioned at fifteen degrees cast unidirectional light to emphasize texture changes — essentially, the raking light technique photographers use to reveal surface detail, applied to human skin in real time. The assembly was strapped to the participant's non-dominant forearm, and the video was time-synchronized to a screen capture of exactly what the participant was seeing in the headset. That meant researchers could link every goose-bump episode to the precise moment in the virtual reality environment that produced it. Not just knowing that goose bumps happened, but knowing when, and during what scene. Participants also completed an experience questionnaire immediately after virtual reality, rating awe, wonder, curiosity, and humility on visual-analog scales from zero to one hundred. They took the Big Five personality inventory and an immersive tendencies questionnaire. And they sat for open-ended interviews whose transcripts were coded against thirty-four consensus categories of awe from Gallagher and colleagues' two thousand fifteen framework. Now for what actually happened. The headline number is seventy-nine point seven — the average self-reported awe rating across all four environments, on that zero to one hundred scale. That is a high number. It means that even in a controlled lab, with a relatively unfamiliar interface and a sample of only sixteen people, interactive virtual reality produced strong, reportable awe reliably. The physiological data confirmed it wasn't just people saying what they thought the researchers wanted to hear. Goose bumps appeared in forty-three point eight percent of participants — seven out of sixteen. Those seven reported dramatically higher awe than the nine who showed no goose bumps: a mean of ninety point nine versus seventy point nine, a statistically significant difference with a t-value of two point eighty-two, a p-value of zero point zero one, and a large effect size of one point forty-two. The skin was tracking something real. Then comes the finding about personalization, which is the most striking result in the paper. Sixty-four percent of all goose-bump episodes occurred during the final, self-selected environment — the phase where participants chose where to go. Not during Mount Everest with its dramatic scale, not during the orbital views. During the phase where someone went back to their hometown, or their parents' neighborhood, or a place connected to family. The interviews explain why. The most common theme, reported by nine of sixteen participants — fifty-six percent — was being captured by the view or drawn to the phenomenon. Nostalgia and connectedness appeared explicitly in multiple transcripts. People weren't just awed by grandeur. They were awed by recognition, by smallness and belonging simultaneously. Qualitatively, eight of sixteen participants reported elation and surprise, six described a dream-like quality to the experience, and five mentioned perceived vastness or scale effects. Two participants explicitly described a diminished sense of self — what the literature calls the small-self phenomenon. And quantitatively, humility ratings correlated with awe ratings, with an r-squared of zero point four one and a p-value of zero point zero zero eight. The person feeling small is the person feeling awed. That's not a surprise, but it's useful to see it show up in both the numbers and the interviews simultaneously. Gender differences appeared in the physiological measure but not the self-report. Females experienced goose bumps more frequently — a mean of one point three occurrences versus zero point three for males, with a t-value of two point twenty-one, a p-value of zero point zero four, and an effect size of one point zero — but females' average awe rating of eighty-four point zero was only modestly higher than males' seventy-seven point one, and that difference wasn't significant. So the emotional experience appears roughly comparable across genders, but the physiological expression differs. That's worth investigating further. Personality traits offered no predictive power. None of the Big Five traits — not openness, not agreeableness, not conscientiousness — significantly predicted awe ratings or goose-bump incidence. Neuroticism showed a small positive relation with awe, but Quesnel and Riecke flag it as a medium effect at best, not a reliable predictor. Immersive tendencies scores were similarly inert. This matters practically: it suggests that awe through virtual reality is not gated by who you are on a personality inventory. It's more democratically available than that. The study also surfaced a design problem worth naming. Ten of sixteen participants visibly struggled with the handheld controllers. Many said seeing the on-screen controller interface pulled their attention out of the scene. Participants turned their heads to check their peripheral field an average of six times per session — an instinct to explore spatially — yet almost none made full body turns, suggesting the controller-based interface suppressed natural embodied exploration. Two participants actually preferred the passive, controller-free color tour over the interactive environments. The tool built to deliver awe was also partially getting in the way of it. The honest limitations here are the ones the authors name directly: sixteen participants with unequal gender balance, four environments always in the same order, qualitative coding by a single researcher. The self-selected environment was always last, so you can't rule out cumulative effects producing the personalization result. These are real constraints on how far to generalize. But the core finding holds. Put someone in an interactive virtual environment, let them navigate to a place that matters to them, give them orbit-level scale alongside ground-level familiarity, and nearly half of them will produce the involuntary physiological signature of awe while rating their experience above ninety out of one hundred. The skin and the questionnaire agree. That's not nothing. That's a proof of concept with a goose-bump camera strapped to a forearm, and it points somewhere genuinely useful: toward virtual reality as a repeatable, accessible, controllable tool for one of the rarer and more beneficial emotional experiences humans can have. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.