Perhaps it’s the breathtaking scope of the Grand Canyon, the exhilarating view from the top of the Eiffel Tower, or the birth of a child – at some point in our lives we’ve all had the feeling of being in a complete and overwhelming sense of awe.

Awe seems to be a universal emotion, but it has been largely neglected by scientists—until now.

Recently, psychological scientists devised a way to study this feeling of awe in the laboratory. Across three different experiments, they found that jaw-dropping moments made participants feel like they had more time available and made them more patient, less materialistic, and more willing to volunteer time to help others. Results of the study, “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being,” will soon be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Study authors Melanie Rudd and Jennifer Aaker of Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management found that the effects that awe has on decision-making and well-being can be explained by awe’s ability to actually change our subjective experience of time by slowing it down.

Prior research on awe — defined as a response to things perceived as vast and overwhelming that alters the way you understand the world — depicted it as a powerful emotion and one that has the potential to increase the perceived ability of time. Several earlier studies had shown that experiences involving awe, such as optimal athletic performances, peak experiences, and spiritual or mystical events, often also involve a sense of timelessness. And whether people believe they have enough time affects many aspects of our lives — from how we eat to how much time we spend having fun. Perceived lack of time has also been linked in studies to depression symptoms and high blood pressure.

To further test the potential link between awe and timelessness, the researchers set up an experiment involving 63 students (39 women). As a cover story, participants were told they would be participating in several unrelated studies. The first component was a sentence unscramble task , in which some of the sentences related to the idea of constricted time. In a second survey, participants were randomly assigned to watch either an awe-eliciting commercial or a happiness-eliciting commercial. After completing some filler questions about television brands, they were given a third survey with both filler questions about personal beliefs and statements about time, such as “Time is expanded” and “Time is slipping away,” to which participants would rate their level of agreement/disagreement. From this, an analysis revealed that as predicted, awe condition participants perceived time as more plentiful than the happiness condition participants., and that stronger feelings of awe were associated with greater perceived time availability.

In two additional experiments, the researchers found that in addition to engendering a perception that time is plentiful, awe, relative to happiness, also curbs impatience, inspires a desire to volunteer time, and impacts decision making, such as choosing experiential over material goods (for example, Broadway show tickets over a watch).

“Experiences of awe help to brings us into the present moment which, in turn, adjusts our perception of time, influences our decisions, and makes life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise,” they say.

Now that’s awesome!

Keren Brown is a passionate advocate for the integration of effective natural therapies into the conventional health care system, as a means to emphasize prevention and minimize chronic disease. She was co-founder and Executive Director of the Holistic Health Research Foundation of Canada, which, during its seven years of operation, raised nearly $2 million for holistic health education and research, and funded more than 20 university-based research studies.  A writer and editor with a communications consulting background, Keren is the President of GoGreenInside^® and the publisher of gogreeninside.com.