The other study examined the effect of awe. Awe lives “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” as two scholars put it. It “is a little studied emotion . . . central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art.”19 It has two key attributes: vastness (the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures). Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker found that the experience of awe—the sight of the Grand Canyon, the birth of a child, a spectacular thunderstorm—changes our perception of
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