Awe liberates the feeling that "my body is mine".
Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend one's current frames of reference. Previous research indicated that awe promotes a smaller self, which led to the creation of a small-self hypothesis. Thus, we shed new light on this hypothesis in terms of sense of body ownership using a rubber hand illusion experiment; through it, we showed that awe evokes an increased sense of body ownership over the rubber hand and this effect was prominent among participants who experienced small self. Our findings suggest that awe might provoke a "liberation of the self" in terms of a sense of body ownership as awe has been thought to liberate existing schemas, hence informing the demonstrable implications of the psychological mechanisms of awe.
['Takano|Ryota|R|0000-0003-1077-2322', 'Nomura|Michio|M|']
D001828:Body Image D004644:Emotions D006225:Hand D006801:Humans D007088:Illusions D055698:Touch Perception D014796:Visual Perception
Awe body ownership rubber hand illusion small self