Solar eclipse: How can it affect our psychological state?

We may not see such drama in response to the total solar eclipse that North American residents are anticipating on April 8, but new research says that this total eclipse may have a significant impact on our psychological state – by eliciting a feeling of astonishment.

The total solar eclipse is one of a few cosmic phenomena capable of taking the breath away and amazeing people.

The matter depends on the movement of the moon between the sun and the Earth, and it happens that the moon completely blocks the sunlight from the Earth for moments.

According to the research, witnessing such an amazing event can humble us humans and inspire our need for compassion among ourselves.

Sean Goldie, a psychology researcher at Hopkins University, investigated the psychological effects of the total solar eclipse that occurred in 2017.

Goldie says that such a phenomenon may push people to become “more integrated into society.”

After a long period of neglect at the level of scientific research, the feeling of amazement has gained attention in scientific studies, especially in the last two decades.

Amazement is defined as a feeling of wonder and astonishment aroused by our awareness of the magnitude of something that we feel so small in ourselves.

Jennifer Stellar, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto, says that astonishment is “the feeling one gets when confronted with something that is too big to comprehend.”

Such situations can result in a change in the lives of those who witness them, according to Dacre Keltner, a psychology researcher at the University of California, in his book entitled “Awesomeness.”

Keltner says that amazement is “a feeling of wonder that can silence the complaining, critical, tyrannical, and self-conscious inner voice of the soul or ‘ego’… This feeling pushes us to pull ourselves together and try to question for a deeper understanding of the patterns of life.”

This result, reached by Keltner and his colleagues, is considered a very important result, and they have collected a lot of evidence in support of this result.

In 2018, a study examined the astonishing feeling of humility. The research team asked half of the study’s sample of respondents to watch a video clip in which the camera angle gradually widens, moving from Earth to the vast universe.

As for the remaining half of the sample of respondents to the study, the researchers asked them to watch a relaxing video clip explaining how to build a fence.

Next, the researchers asked people in both groups to write in two minutes about their strengths and weaknesses.

As the researchers hypothesized, the writings of the group that watched the first video about the vast universe showed a tendency to be humble about strengths.

In another study by the same research team, the researchers asked a third of the sample of respondents to recall a time when they felt astonished. While the researchers asked another third of the sample to recall a time when they experienced a funny joke. While the remaining third of the sample of respondents, the researchers asked them to remember a time they spent on a trip to buy their needs from grocery stores without any noteworthy events occurring during that trip.

The researchers then asked the three groups to answer a series of questions aimed at assessing (on a scale from 0% to 100%) the extent to which various factors influenced their life achievements – including those factors, their own talents or external forces such as luck or fate.

You would expect, dear reader, that the most humble respondent would tend to mention external forces – and this is exactly what the researchers found – in the answers of the first group who recalled a time when they felt astonished.

In this regard, Jennifer Stellar, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto, says: “This is understandable, since the feeling of astonishment reduces a person’s appreciation of his own importance and his narcissism. The ‘ego’ within us guides our senses and is what drives us to make decisions, and when a feeling greater than that ego attacks us, Likewise, the feeling that astonishes us destroys the power that the ego has over a person.

In addition to making us feel humble about our abilities, the shrinkage of the “ego” helps us see others in a new light.

“When I feel less narcissistic, the line between myself and others becomes blurry,” Stellar says. “Then I can see that we are all part of a whole, which is humanity.”

Beyond those blurry lines, the researchers asked survey respondents to describe how close they felt to their communities. The pictures were made up of pairs of circles – each pair consisted of two circles, one of which represented the respondent while the other circle represented the people or society around him.

The images looked a bit like a Venn diagram; Where the overlapping circles symbolize the strength of community integration.

This method may seem a little vague or ambiguous, but it is considered a standard measure of social cohesion, and after watching the startling video, respondents chose the circles with the greatest overlap.

As important as these experiments are, they may not necessarily reflect people’s automatic reactions to natural phenomena outside the laboratory – something that concerned Sean Goldie, a psychology researcher at Hopkins University, when he began preparing his doctoral dissertation.

“I was looking for a way to study people as they experience something very important,” Goldie says.

The total solar eclipse in 2017 brought a solution to Goldie’s insomnia – the rare alignment of the moon with the sun, which sparked a feeling of amazement.

This rare event prompted many to express their feelings on social media, which in turn was considered an excellent opportunity to directly measure people’s reactions to the event (the total solar eclipse).

To collect his data, Goldie had to go to the Twitter (X) platform. By looking at data on users’ geographic locations, Goldie was able to predict which users had seen the total solar eclipse, and who had missed it.

After that, Goldie analyzed the discourse contained in users’ posts on the platform.

Expressions such as “amazing” or “mind-blowing” were substitutes for “amazing,” while more conservative expressions such as “maybe” and “might be” represented a sense of humility.

While the researcher inferred social integration through words such as “care” or “volunteering,” as well as words indicating gratitude and love.

The results were impressive enough to raise eyebrows in themselves. People in the path of a total solar eclipse were more likely (almost twice as much) to express amazement in their tweets.

As expected, this tendency toward astonishment was mixed with greater feelings of humility and social inclusion.

This could have been easily observed in the pronouns used by these people, as they were more likely to use the first person collective pronoun “we” or “our subjects” – which reflects a collective experience and a shared experience, compared to those who did not fall in the path of the total solar eclipse.

Researcher Goldie emphasized that the effects were relatively short-lived, “within only 24 hours.” But even this brief period of togetherness is to be welcomed as an elusive moment of respite from our daily maelstrom of tensions.

In this era of societal polarization and division, we humans can still find common ground in our amazement and astonishment at Mother Nature around us, and this tempts you, dear reader, to wait for the spectacle of the total solar eclipse expected on April 8th.