Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement Are Associated with Dispositional Awe

Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement Are Associated with Dispositional Awe is a work by Paula G. Williams (2022).

Core claims

• Williams and colleagues establish that aesthetic engagement and dispositional awe are distinct but correlated constructs — individuals who habitually engage with beauty also tend toward more frequent and intense experiences of awe, suggesting a shared underlying capacity for self-transcendent perception.
• The paper demonstrates that aesthetic engagement predicts awe beyond what personality traits like openness to experience can account for, positioning aesthetic sensitivity as a specific psychological capacity rather than a general personality dimension.
• By linking aesthetic engagement to interoceptive awareness, the study provides evidence that the body’s capacity to sense its own internal states is foundational to both aesthetic experience and awe — that being moved by beauty requires first being available to one’s own embodied responses.

Related questions

• If interoceptive awareness is foundational to both aesthetic engagement and awe, does this support the depth psychological claim that the body is the unconscious in its most immediate form — that access to the numinous requires first access to one’s own visceral life?
• How does the finding that aesthetic engagement predicts awe beyond openness to experience challenge the Big Five framework’s capacity to capture what depth psychology calls the differentiated feeling function?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/williams-aesthetic-engagement-awe/

---

This is a Tier 1 stub node, generated from the library catalog. It provides the work’s place in the graph and basic typed edges. A Tier 3 deep recon can enrich it with passage-level concept development, figure engagements, and inter-work edges.