Awe-Inducing Interior Space: Architectural Causes and Cognitive Effects

1. EXTENDED ABSTRACT Recent work applying a Darwinian perspective to religious monumental architecture (RMA) has argued that by eliciting awe, churches and other RMA structures foster religious openness and facilitate social cohesion (Joye & Verpooten, 2013). Other recent work has found that feeling awe increases both belief in supernatural control (Valdesolo & Graham, 2014) and spiritual intention among people who are religious or spiritual (Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012). These findings led us to ask whether religious building designs might capitalize on such effects to promote or facilitate religious feeling. In order to elucidate how church interiors elicit awe and otherwise shape affective and cognitive processes, we investigated how built spaces induce awe. Specifically, we developed a rating scale for the measurement of physical properties of interior spaces in order to determine which architectural properties in an interior space can predict a sense of awe (Study 1). The scale was used to measure 24 architectural properties of 60 different interior spaces. Participants then viewed these 60 pre-rated images and reported their affective response to each. Their emotion ratings showed a predictive relationship between architectural properties and elicited emotion. Properties reflecting size, age, contour, and ornament significantly predicted a feeling of awe. The results from Study 1 guided the selection of stimuli for Study 2, in which we explored the effects of visually priming participants with photographs of high and low awe-inducing architectural interiors on time perception and spirituality, as well as the effects of priming participants with photographs of religious and non-religious building interiors on participant religiousness. Feeling awe led to an overestimation of time in a time-estimation task, confirming earlier findings that feeling awe expands one’s sense of time (Rudd, Vohs, & Aaker, 2012). This work establishes an initial understanding of cognitive processes underlying affective and social responses to the environmental cues of church interiors.

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