“Awe Walks” Can Boost Positive Emotions Among Older Adults

By Emma Young After the age of about 75, people tend to feel more anxiety, sadness and loneliness, and less in the way of positive emotion. Strategies to prevent or at least counteract these deteriorations are badly needed, and new research by a team in the US, published in the journal Emotion, has now identified one apparently promising strategy: so-called “awe walks”. As Virginia Strum at the University of California and her colleagues note, awe is a positive emotion felt by people “when they are in the presence of something vast that they cannot immediately understand”. A walk through a desert, a beautiful piece of art, a wedding — all of these things, and more, can lead to feelings of awe. Earlier work shows that when we feel awe, our focus shifts from our self to the wider world, leading us to perceive ourselves as being less significant, or “smaller”, and also making us feel more socially connected to our community. This could lead to a rise in positive, prosocial emotions, the team reasoned — and might help to combat typical age-related increases in negative emotions and loneliness. To investigate the potential of their awe walk idea, the team recruited 52 healthy adults aged 60 to 90, half of whom formed a control group. Both groups were told to take a 15 minute outdoor walk, ideally alone, every week for eight weeks, and to take three photographs of themselves each time — one before, one during and one after the walk. ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Positive psychology Source Type: blogs