Study Of The Effect Of Awe On Patience

Patience is a positive personality strength and ideal personality trait,which is very important for promoting human prosperity and happiness.Studies have found that impatience has a negative impact on individual consumption behavior,happiness,traffic safety and even the national economy.Therefore,how to improve people’s patience has gradually become the focus of researchers.Awe is amazing emotional experience when we are presence of something vast,and that the elicitor transcends one’s current frame of reference for understanding world.In recent years,more and more empirical studies have emerged to explore the positive effects of awe.Some studies have found that awe,as a positive emotion,can change the individual’s perception of time and expand people’s perception of time availability.Moreover,there is a close relationship between time perception and impatience.Therefore,we speculate that awe may affect the patience of individuals by affecting their time perception.Based on previous research,we conducted four studies to examine the impact of awe on patience by combining questionnaires with behavioral research methods,and tried to explore the mediating effect of time availability and subjective speed of time passage in time perception.In Study 1,we preliminarily explored the relationship between dispositional awe,dispositional patience and time availability through questionnaire survey.The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between dispositional awe and dispositional patience,but no mediating effect of time availability was found.In Study 2,natural landscape video was used to initiate awe,the effect of awe experience on patience in reading tasks was investigated.It was found that the awe significantly increased the reading time of the subjects and the patience of completing reading tasks.In Study 3,we explored whether the awe induced by narrative recall task reduced the pleasure experienced by individuals from the pleasure experience,and exploring the mediating effects of time availability and subjective speed of time passage.The results showed that the awe experience increased the patience of individual listening to pleasure music and the joy of enjoying the music experience,in which individual subjective speed of time passage plays a full mediating role,while time availability has no mediating role.In Study 4,we investigated the effects of unnatural factors-induced awe on economic patience,and the results showed that individuals with awe experience were more likely to choose delayed but larger reward options,and the time to complete the intertemporal task was longer,among which the speed of time passage perceived by the individuals only played a partial mediating role in the intertemporal task completion time.In conclusion,the present study found that awe increases an individual’s patience level,and that the effect of awe on the patience of an individual’s current task completion and experience is mediated by the perceived speed of time passage.Future research needs to further explore the effect of threat-based awe on patience and other possible mediators.