An exploratory study into the effects of extraordinary nature on emotions, mood, and prosociality

Think about the last time you stood somewhere big. Not pretty. Big. A cliff where the wind presses your jacket, a thunderhead that seems to stack forever, a horizon so wide your eyes don't know where to land. We know the gentler side of nature — parks, gardens, a quiet walk under trees — helps us reset. That's the Kaplan and Kaplan world, Ulrich's hospital windows, all those studies showing attention comes back online and stress loosens its grip after time in everyday green. But the high-voltage stuff? The grand and a little scary? That's been more of a hunch than a dataset. So, Joye and Bolderdijk decided to test it. They put awe front and center, not as a byproduct of a nice walk, but as the main event. They built a simple three-way contrast and kept everything else the same. One group of people saw a slideshow of awesome nature — big mountains, storms, sunsets, the works. Another saw mundane nature — grass, foliage, trees, the sort of thing you'd pass on a morning jog. A third group got neutral objects like ladders and buckets. Fourteen images per show. At least ten seconds per image. Same screen size, same pacing, same web-based setup. The sample was classic online science: U.S. adults on Mechanical Turk, recruited into a Qualtrics study. Two hundred fifteen started; thirteen were dropped for extreme slowness using a robust outlier rule, leaving 202 people divided across the three conditions — 70 in awe, 68 in mundane, and 64 in neutral. They paid attention. On average, folks spent about twelve seconds on each image, and, importantly, viewing time didn't differ by condition. That matters, because you don't want "awe" to be just "lingered longer." What did they measure? Two things you feel inside, and two that point outward. Inside, they took mood twice on a zero-to-one hundred slider — before and after the slideshow — and they collected emotion ratings after the viewing. Awe itself, fear, spirituality, care, and feeling connected to others each on a seven-point scale. They also asked how "emotionally affected" people felt on a zero-to-one hundred slider, and they built a "smallness" index from feelings like humility and respect. For the outward piece, they split prosociality into attitude and action. Attitude was social value orientation, or SVO — essentially, how much weight you put on another person's payoff when you're splitting points between you and them. If you divide what the "other" gets by the total points both of you get, that ratio gives a per-choice SVO; average nine of those choices and you get a stable score. A zero point five means you're happy with even splits; lower values tilt self-focused. Action was willingness to donate to disaster victims — food, clothing, money, blood — each on a nine-step scale, then averaged. First question: did the awesome slideshows actually feel awesome? Yes, by a lot. People reported the highest awe in the awesome condition — six point twenty-one on that seven-point scale — compared with four point thirty-four for mundane nature and two point sixteen for neutral objects. That's your manipulation check, but it's also a clue that awe isn't just "nature in general." It's a different emotional flavor. The awesome condition also dialed up "smallness," the sense of being a little thing in a very big world, well above the other two. Fear ticked up too — not terror, more of that safe "wow, that's powerful" edge — again higher in awesome than mundane or neutral. And when they asked about beauty, interest, and surprise, the awesome slides cleaned up: beauty was rated near the top of the scale, interest was higher than mundane, and surprise jumped most in awe. That's the distinct signature — vastness, a pinch of fear, and a jolt of novelty all together. Here's a nuance that's easy to miss and important. Not every warm social feeling separated the two flavors of nature. Spirituality rose in both awesome and mundane compared with neutral. Care did too, and so did feeling connected to others. In other words, being around any nature — even the ordinary stuff — seemed to pull people a bit toward the sacred, the tender, the communal. Awe layered extra intensity, and with it that small-but-safe fear and a stronger sense of smallness. Two tracks, overlapping but not the same. Okay, mood. This is where the rubber meets the road for everyday wellbeing. Across the whole sample, mood rose from before to after the slideshow. That's good, but it hides the spread. The biggest lift came from awesome nature: mood jumped by about nine points on that zero-to-one hundred scale. Mundane nature nudged it up by a few points. Neutral images didn't help; if anything, they sagged a bit, roughly two points down. If you look just after viewing, people in both nature conditions were sitting in the low seventies, while neutral landed near fifty-nine. That's a real difference you could feel walking away from your screen. Why did awesome nature help mood more than ordinary nature? Joye and Bolderdijk ran a mediation analysis — think of it as asking, "does reported awe carry some of this effect?" — and the answer was yes. When they compared awesome to mundane, the indirect path through awe was statistically reliable; the confidence interval for that indirect effect ran from about minus seven point eight to minus zero point five on the mood change score, not crossing zero. Translation: the more awe you felt, the more your mood improved under awesome versus mundane images, and that wasn't just noise. They also checked basic links: awe correlated with mood improvement, moderately, at about zero point thirty-two. That's not everything, but it's not trivial. Now for the social piece, and this is where the story splits. On SVO — the "how much do I weigh your outcomes?" measure — awesome nature pushed people toward the prosocial side. The average SVO rose to zero point forty-seven in the awesome condition compared with zero point forty-two in both mundane and neutral. That's a small but consistent shift in how people allocate between self and other. Awe related to that shift too; the correlation between awe and SVO across the nature conditions was about zero point twenty-seven. So the emotion and the orientation moved in tandem. But when you ask about concrete helping — that four-item donation index — the dial didn't budge. Whether people saw awesome nature, ordinary nature, or neutral objects, their reported willingness to donate food, clothing, money, or blood sat in the same range. And those donation intentions didn't track SVO either; the correlation was basically zero. That's a useful caution. Feeling more oriented toward others doesn't always convert, immediately, into pulling out your wallet or rolling up your sleeve, at least not in a brief online setting. Did awe "cause" the SVO shift the way it mediated mood? The indirect test said no. The confidence interval for the pathway from condition through awe to SVO included zero — from about minus zero point zero five up to zero itself — which means we can't claim that reported awe, as measured here, explains the SVO bump. That doesn't rule out a role for awe; it just says that, with these measures and this sample, you can't pin the orientation change on awe alone. It could be overlapping feelings, the social connectedness piece, or simply the global positivity that comes with powerful scenes. Or it could be that SVO needs time to consolidate, whereas mood is instant. Under the hood, the design was careful in ways that make these differences credible. Participants were randomized to one slideshow. Everyone saw fourteen images with a minimum exposure, and no condition ran longer. The analyses matched the questions: standard one-way analyses for emotions and evaluations, a mixed design for mood that tracked change within people, and then those bootstrap mediations to ask about mechanisms without pretending causality. Even small details matter: initial mood varied a bit by chance, so they adjusted post-slideshow mood for the baseline, and the pattern held. No one correctly guessed the study purpose at the end. These are small guardrails, but together they keep the story from drifting. There are limits, and the authors are upfront about them. This was brief, virtual exposure — pictures on a screen, not a body on a ridge line with wind and cold air and the smell of rain. Awe itself was measured with a single item, which is efficient but can miss texture. The "awesome nature" category was a mix of big landscapes and dramatic weather; with such a blend, you can't tell which kind of image packed the most punch. Prosociality was entirely self-report, and the donation tool — a nine-step arrow bar — wasn't the most intuitive interface, which could blunt sensitivity. And while mediation is a powerful way to probe pathways, it can't settle direction. Feeling awe and then reporting higher SVO is consistent with awe nudging orientation, but it's also consistent with people who are more prosocial finding awe more salient. You need experiments with tighter levers or time to sort that out. So what do we take away? First, awe is not just "more nature." Ordinary green spaces do what we've known for decades: they warm mood a bit, lift spirituality, and nudge people toward care and connection compared with staring at objects. Awe-evoking nature adds a different layer: a sharpened sense of scale, a tingle of fear, more surprise, and, crucially, a bigger boost in how you feel right now. That mood lift tracks with how much awe you report. Second, the social mind has multiple dials. Internal orientation — what you consider fair or desirable in a split — can shift without an immediate jump in stated helping. That gap isn't a failure of awe; it's a reminder that prosocial behavior depends on context, norms, and friction. Clicking on a donation slider in a lab survey is a thin slice of that. If you're thinking about real life — classrooms, clinics, city planning — the implication is both humble and promising. You probably don't need Yosemite to get everyday benefits. Street trees and small parks keep paying dividends. But when you can deliver scale and surprise safely — a planetarium dome, a storm time-lapse, a well-made panoramic film, or yes, a trip to the mountains — there's a case that the emotional payoff is larger and that people briefly recalibrate how much the "other" matters in their internal calculus. Where would I love to see this go next? Take it outside. Keep the same core measures — mood change, awe, SVO, and a concrete behavioral choice — but move from screens to spaces: domes, overlooks, even urban rooftops with big vistas. Stretch time. Do the same test across days or weeks and see if the SVO shift accumulates or vanishes. And bring in measures that don't rely only on self-report — physiological arousal during viewing, a real donation choice with small stakes, a chance to help a stranger in the moment. That's not a knock on what Joye and Bolderdijk built. It's the next step for a simple, elegant design that showed something we've all felt: when the world gets big around you, you get a little smaller, your mood gets lighter, and — at least for a moment — the line between "me" and "we" moves.