A regular dose of awe is a simple way to boost healthy ‘prosocial’ emotions such as compassion and gratitude, according to a study by researchers at the UC San Francisco Memory and Aging Center (MAC) and the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) – a partnership between UCSF and Trinity College Dublin to improve brain health worldwide.

In the study, published in the journal Emotion, older adults who took weekly 15-minute “awe walks” for eight weeks reported increased positive emotions and less distress in their daily lives. This shift was reflected in “selfies” participants took on their weekly walks, in which an increasing focus on their surroundings rather than themselves was paralleled by measurably broader smiles by the end of the study.

“Negative emotions, particularly loneliness, have well-documented negative effects on the health of older adults, particularly those over age 75,” said Virginia Sturm, PhD, an associate professor of in the departments of Neurology and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the John Douglas French Alzheimer's Foundation Endowed Professor in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “What we show here is that a very simple intervention – essentially a reminder to occasionally shift our energy and attention outward instead of inward – can lead to significant improvements in emotional well-being.”

Sturm directs the Clinical Affective Neuroscience (CAN) laboratory in the UCSF MAC, where her team studies how neurodegenerative disease affects the brain’s emotional systems. Sturm and her group have previously documented increased empathy and emotional contagion – meaning a tendency to mirror the emotions of others – as an early feature of Alzheimer’s disease.

The new study was inspired by a call from GBHI for research proposals to identify simple, low-cost interventions to improve brain health. Sturm says she immediately began to think about how to improve emotional well-being in older adults, and partnered with UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, PhD, an expert in emotion, to develop a simple intervention.

“Awe is a positive emotion triggered by awareness of something vastly larger than the self and not immediately understandable — such as nature, art, music, or being caught up in a collective act such as a ceremony, concert or political march,” Keltner said. “Experiencing awe can contribute to a host of benefits including an expanded sense of time and enhanced feelings of generosity, well-being and humility.”

The researchers recruited 52 healthy older adults from the MAC’s long-running Hilblom Healthy Aging Study, led by study co-author Joel Kramer, PsyD, a professor of neurology and director of the MAC Neuropsychology program. They asked each of these participants to simply take at least one 15-minute walk each week for eight weeks. For half of the participants, the researchers also described the emotion of awe and suggested trying to experience that emotion during their walks. 

Participants filled out brief surveys after each walk, detailing characteristics of the walk and the emotions they had experienced, including questions intended to assess their experience of awe. These surveys showed that people in the “awe group” reported increasing experience of awe on their walks as the study went on, suggesting some benefit of practice.