Awe Promotes Relationship Quality and Prosocial Motivation through Appreciation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a self-transcendent emotion, awe shifts one’s focus away from the self and towards others (e.g., Stellar et al., 2017). Past work has examined the influence of awe on an individual’s self-concept and interactions with strangers, but a greater outward focus induced by awe may have consequences within long-term intimate bonds. I examined the affiliative effects of awe within the context of close relationships. I hypothesized that feeling awe would be associated with heightened relationship quality as well as prosocial motivation. In addition, I predicted that appreciation of one’s partner would mediate these effects. In Studies 1 and 2, dispositional reports of awe were positively correlated with relationship satisfaction and commitment, as well as willingness to sacrifice. In Study 2, participants who were experimentally induced to feel awe by watching an awe-inspiring video did not report heightened relationship satisfaction, commitment, or willingness to sacrifice compared to a neutral or positive control video. In Study 3, a 14-day experience sampling study, on days when participants felt higher than average levels of awe, they reported higher relationship quality and greater endorsement of prosocial motives for sacrifice. The partner’s awe was also associated with the actor’s prosocial motives for sacrifice, and the actor’s own awe predicting prosocial motives dropped to nonsignificance when accounting for the partner’s reports (Study 3). Appreciation mediated the effects of dispositional and daily awe on both relationship quality and prosocial motives for sacrifice (Studies 2 and 3). Together, these studies suggest that awe may promote the maintenance of long-term close relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".