Author: Lorenzo Pasquini, PhD, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco.
Lorenzo Pasquini is an assistant professor at UCSF’s Neuroscape Center, where he explores the neural basis of emotional well-being in older adults using multimodal non-invasive methods such as fMRI, EEG, and autonomic physiology recordings.
What is awe?
Awe is a powerful emotion characterized by a sense of wonder, reverence, and sometimes even fear in response to something grand, beautiful, or extraordinary.
It's that feeling you get when you witness something vast and incomprehensible, like a breathtaking natural landscape, the night sky filled with stars, or a remarkable human achievement.
Awe can be triggered by various experiences, including encounters with nature, art, music, or even moments of deep connection with others.
It often inspires feelings of humility, gratitude, and a sense of being part of something larger than oneself.
An iconic example is the experience of the “overview effect”, first coined by space writer Frank White in 1987, which describes a profound experience of awe for our home planet and a sense of responsibility for taking care of it.
Researchers around the globe are recognizing the primary importance of awe, as a powerful emotion that promotes well-being, positive attitudes, and social connections.
Luckily for us, feelings of awe are happening only by astronauts traveling to outer space but can be experienced in our everyday life and can even be induced in the laboratory setting.
This is of paramount importance, since, despite the recognized importance of awe, little is known about the neural and bodily underpinning of this important emotion.
How to study the physiological basis of emotions?
The study of the physiological basis of emotions has fascinated generations of psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosophers, starting with the seminal work of William James, one of the most influential figures in modern psychology.
Since then, researchers have used various methods and techniques to study the phsyiolgical basis of emotions, from conducting highly controlled experiments in animal models to designing ecologically valid observational studies in human participants. Particularly in the latter case, non-invasive methods, such as autonomic phsysiology recordings, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electroencephalography (EEG), have been recognized as powerful tools to explore the physiological signatures of emotions.
While autonomic phsyiology measures ongoing changes in our heart rate, respiration rate, and sweating, which are linked to emotional process, the two latter techniques attempt at measuring activity in the brain.
EEG is a method for recording the brain's electrical activity via electrodes placed in your head. fMRI measures the delivery of oxygeneated blood to brain regions, and as such a proxy of neural activity. It has been valued for it’s high spatial resolution, but one major limitation is it’s temporal resolution.
EEG, on the other hand, is an unexpensive method to directly measure the electrical activity generated by the organized firing of billions of neurons in the brain.
These voltage fluctuations are typically categorized into bandwidths (such as delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma) that correspond to different types of cognitive functions, such as sleep or deep concentration.
Since emotions are increasingly recognized as dynamic and fast processes, EEG has been playing an increasingly prominent role in the idenitifcation of pshysiological signatures of emotions.
Achieving the task of idenitifying reliable signature of emotions is of paramout importance, since it could contribute to real-life applications and needed clinical tools to be used for the monitoring of negative emotions, such as sadness, disgust, and anger, or the promotion of positive emotions, such as awe, amusement, and joy.
What do I do?
In my ongoing research, I use naturalistic audiovisual stimuli to induce awe in older, healthy volunteers, while I continuously measure their brain activity through simoultanous EEG and autonomic physiology recordings.
I then apply state-of-the art machine learning approaches to identify personalized signatures of the experience of awe.
My future goals are to study how awe is impacted in lonely older adults and to explore whether this positive emotion can be promoted through tailored interventions, such as remote mindfulness training.
I hope that my research will spark interest in this domain and contribute to the development of monitoring devices, such as those developed by Awear, that promote mental well-being for everyone.
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