124. Tea, Community, and the Psychology of Awe

"Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day." – Henri Nouwen

This week on The Modern Creative Woman Podcast, Dr. Amy shares reflections from hosting a benefit tea party for I Support the Girls and how small, simple acts of service can ripple out into meaningful change.

Then we dive deep into the psychology of wonder and awe — what they are, how they shape our perception of the world, and why openness to experience makes us more likely to feel them. You’ll learn:

✨ The difference between happiness, wonder, and awe
✨ What personality trait predicts your ability to feel awe
✨ Simple daily practices to spark wonder — from sky-gazing to art-making
✨ Why cultivating awe can shift your mindset and boost well-being

This episode will leave you inspired to slow down, look around, and notice the extraordinary in the everyday.

🔗 Links & Resources:

• I Support the Girls
  – Donate or host your own simple benefit
• Free 21-Day Gratitude Challenge
• Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman Digital Magazine

🎧 Listen now and share with three friends who could use a little more wonder in their lives!

Transcript

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. This quote from each Newman starts us off today. So we're talking about wonder and awe. Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast. I'm Doctor Amy Bakos, your hostess on this audio creativity journey. I'm excited to tell you about my weekend and the benefit that I hosted. I invited women to come have tea and cake with me and to bring a donation for the organization. I support the girls. We had a really fun time and I collected a lot. And the ambassador for I support the girls in San Francisco will help me figure out who in the city has the most need for such things in the women's shelters. I encouraged everyone who came to the party to reflect on solutions and how we can all be a part of supporting our community and individually contributing to solutions to make the world a little bit better of a place. And I want to encourage you to do the same. It was simple. It wasn't anything above and beyond what I might do to host friends for a get together. Yet the act of service gave us all something to talk about and a little bit of inspiration, and we got to be around women sharing ideas on how we can continue this process of supporting women in our communities. So if you decide to do a little benefit, let me know how it goes and I'll put the link to. I support the girls in the show notes, so you can check out the amazing work that they've been doing all across the US for the last decade. Now let's take a dive into the psychology and the science behind that wonderful phenomenon of wonder and awe. Let's get into this. Let's get this started. We've been talking about wondering the last few weeks. And remember, wonder is this curiosity mixed with admiration? It also involves an openness to the unknown, or is really a response to the vastness, the challenges, our current mental structures when we suddenly realize there's a whole new way of thinking about things, we can be in awe of, an intellectual concept, or a new way of feeling. When you meet your person or you have a baby, the vastness is suddenly apparent. Now, these often overlap. The way you can think about how they're different is all really includes more of an intense emotion and some kind of humility. You are aware of your smallness in the context of the world. The field of psychology is really interested in these two emotions, and there's a lot of research on or. So if you think of it how the mind works and then how are impacts that the mind forms, stores and manipulates really elaborate conceptual models of the world? It's amazing. We go from learning nothing to having these elaborate concepts over time. Where the model ends, however, is where the potential for wonder and awe begins. And this is from a research study by Shiota in 2021 through the New York Academy of Sciences, and the research finds very distinct implications of or for how we're perceiving our environment and how we're thinking about ourselves. There really is a promise of improving our experience, the human experience when we're able to tap into or the amazing thing about this or is really accessible in everyday life, and it can be an incredibly valuable tool in enhancing our wellbeing. In 2015, there is an interesting study by Libor Lynch and Hicks, and that's from the Journal of Cognition and Emotion. And they asked participants about wonder and awe and happiness. And what they discovered is they are three very distinct experiences. Happiness was reflected in the context of a social relationship focus not so much on the environment, so we might be happy in the context of parenting a romantic relationship, our colleagues at work. There's a happiness that is social and relationship focused. You can be content with a friendship or on the other hand, was related to how we're observing the world. It has a much more of an environmental focus. And when the research participants were describing are they used a lot of perception words, what they see and feel, what they hear and imagine. And finally, wonder was most specifically rated related to understanding the world. And that was reflected in this greater use of cognitive complexity. People were using more tentative words to describe wonder. It's extremely difficult to put your finger on it and how it feels to be in that space. Wonder, however, did have this environmental focus. There's something they were experiencing in the wider world. Now some people experience are more than others. So who experiences more are. There are profound aesthetic experiences that are associated with awe, and it's often described as that sense of wonder and also amazement, fascination, being moved, feeling touched. And that idea of the profound aesthetic experience comes from self often and newborn. That was 2015. In the psychology of aesthetics, creativity in the arts. So can you hypothesize the answer to their research question? Can you guess what type of person tends to experience these powerful states? Well, guess what personality influences are? Researchers hypothesize that a person who is open to experience has a propensity for these, or like experiences that stretch our normal ways of thinking about ourselves in the world. And if you think back to psychology 101, there's the big five personality variables. And in this study, the Sylvia study, 103 adults examine the role of openness to experience using nature and music. So 103 people participated and the researchers were looking at art and music. Two of my favorite things. They asked people to look at 14 images of the sky and space. And next they asked them to listen to a song that had qualities known to invoke, or they rated their experience. Each of the participants, based on the images and music, and the aspects that emerged were all wonder and fascination. So what do you think they found? Do you think openness to new experience might impact wonder and awe? If you said yes, you would be correct. Openness to new. Openness to experience. That personality variable predicted that experience of awe for both looking at the sky and space images and for the music and awe was correlated across all the various domains. And so what all of that means is if you're going to experience or in music, you'll probably feel it in art as well. And that one variable gave us the sense of knowing who was most likely to experience. Or so. Might there be any other personality variables that play a role in feeling awe? Well, the researchers did their due diligence and had a look at all five of the personality variables. So of course there's the openness to experience conscientiousness, extraversion or introversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Those are the big five variables, and we all land somewhere on a continuum in each of these categories. The other four factors of personality had a much smaller effect on the experience of R, and you might be interested to know that one personality variable had zero ability to predict wonder and awe. Can you guess extroversion had zero impact on a person's ability to experience wonder and awe, which means that these all Ike experiences are completely different from the positive emotions that are typically associated with having an extroverted personality style, or engaging in extroverted behavior where you're enjoying yourself, out with friends, etc.. So these results really support the view that openness to experience is essentially an aesthetic trait. And it extends into deeper and deeper aesthetic states. And once you start to tap into your openness to new experience, aesthetics becomes increasingly important to feeling pretty good about the world. Have you ever looked at a painting in the museum and been so captured by it and felt so much about it? Or perhaps you've had a moment of looking at the night sky and seeing the stars and being overcome with the vastness experience that feeling of wonder and awe and curiosity. Those moments can be captured in a more regular basis. Of course, hanging art around your house, putting things on your screensaver that feel really good to you. Images of the sky. You can have a look at anytime you want. And of course, there is song that inspires you and gives you such amazing feel good experience. Those are always available to us. So here's what I suggest. In that research study they looked at 14 pictures of the night sky. So do a search and pull up some images of the night sky or of space, and spend a moment looking carefully at each of the images and pay attention to how you feel, and you'll start to cultivate a feeling of, wow, look at that! That's amazing. That wonder and awe really does emerge. Then give yourself the opportunity to describe it in words. And the act of translating, feeling and an emotive experience into words helps us recreate. It, helps us look for it and gives us language to use when we're seeking out some inspiration. Last month, Inside the Modern Creative Woman membership, we went through a whole process of cultivating wonder and awe through the use of images. And then I led the women through an art directive. And once you're tapped into these emotions, you start seeing them everywhere. And that idea comes from what's called value priming, where once you see something and you'll see it again, if you're looking at to buy a car and you want to buy a red car, suddenly you'll see red cars everywhere. If you are looking for and tapping into opportunities to experience this feeling of wonder and awe, suddenly it will become apparent to you that it's everywhere. If you sit quietly for just a couple of minutes and you sit outside in nature, close your eyes and then open them, you can really have a sense of curiosity. Closing your eyes for 10s is like a soft reset. I've mentioned this here before. 10s of your eyes closed below your day will give you a very nice reset, especially if you're stuck on a challenge or you're unsure how to get through a particular aspect of what you're working on. That 10s soft reset will do wonders for you. A 20 minute walk will do even better. This sitting outside, your eyes closed for ten minutes 10s and then noticing what emerges in front of you with careful attention is a wonderful practice for cultivating this feel good emotion. Wonder or fascination. Curiosity. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? What more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out once a month. And I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level, I want you to know you have options inside the membership. And if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Bakos. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month. All those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Creative Women. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.