The experience of awe is typically elicited in response to perceptually vast stimuli and is often characterized by feeling small and insignificant. In the present series of studies we aimed (1) to determine the effects of awe on body perception and (2) to elucidate the role of the personality trait of 'absorption' (i.e. the tendency to get fully immersed in one's experiences) in relation to the feeling of awe. Across 4 different studies, involving both lab-based and field experiments, we found that feelings of awe are associated with smaller body size estimates. We also found that absorption is a strong predictor of feelings of awe: people scoring high on absorption tended to report overall stronger feelings of aweirrespective of the experimental manipulation. In addition, experimentally manipulating absorption, by instructing participants to get fully absorbed in an external stimulus resulted in stronger feelings of awe. Thereby these findings illustrate that two key features underlying the experience of awe are changes in the perception of one's body and a tendency to get absorbed in internal or external stimuli.

Past research suggests that pathogen-avoidance motives (e.g., disgust sensitivity) relate to greater opposition to immigration. Two accounts have been proposed to explain this relationship, one of which emphasizes proximally avoiding outgroups, and the other of which emphasizes adherence to traditional norms. According to the former, immigrants are perceived as being more infectious because they carry novel pathogens due to their foreign ecological origins. According to the latter, immigrants' foreign norms are perceived as posing a pathogen threat. This study aimed to disentangle these accounts. Participants (N = 975) were randomly assigned to read a description of an immigrant who had high or low contact with locals and high or low assimilation to local norms. The effect of disgust sensitivity on sentiments toward the immigrant (and immigrants like him) was compared across conditions. Results supported the traditional norms account: disgust sensitivity related to anti-immigrant sentiments when the immigrant was described as not assimilating to local norms, but not when he was described as assimilating. Contrary to the outgroup avoidance account, the relationship between disgust sensitivity and anti-immigrant sentiments did not vary across the high-contact and low-contact conditions. Results suggest that resistance to foreign norms, rather than avoidance of novel pathogens, better explains the relationship between pathogen avoidance and outgroup prejudice.

People vary in the degree to which they experience disgust toward—and, consequently, avoid—cues to pathogens. Prodigious work has measured this variation and observed that it relates to, among other things, personality, psychopathological tendencies, and moral and political sentiments. Less work has sought to generate hypotheses aimed at explaining why this variation exists in the first place, and even less work has evaluated how well data support these hypotheses. In this paper, we present and review the evidence supporting three such proposals. First, researchers have suggested that variability reflects a general tendency to experience anxiety or emotional distress. Second, researchers have suggested that variability arises from parental modelling, with offspring calibrating their pathogen avoidance based on their parents' reactions to pathogen cues. Third, researchers have suggested that individuals calibrate their disgust sensitivity to the parasite stress of the ecology in which they develop. We conclude that none of these hypotheses is supported by existing data, and we propose directions for future research aimed at better understanding this variation.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Evolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours’.

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