Chapter 9 Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory 285Maslow referred to extremely positive experiences that involve a sense of awe,
wonder, and reverence as peak experiences. While such experiences are more
common among self-actualizers, they can be experienced to various degrees by
other people as well. Recently, researchers have investigated the potential ben-
efits that come from reexperiencing, through writing or thinking, such positive
experiences. In one such study, participants were instructed to write about a
positive experience or experiences for 20 minutes each day for 3 consecutive
days (Burton & King, 2004). Instructions given to participants before starting
were derived directly from Maslow’s writings on peak experiences, and they
asked participants to write about their “happiest moments, ecstatic moments,
moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, from listening to music or
suddenly ‘being hit’ by a book or painting or from some great creative moment”
(p. 155). Experiencing such positive awe-inspiring events will undoubtedly
enhance positive emotion, and, as this study tested, perhaps simply recalling such
events from the past by writing about them can also enhance positive emotion.
The experience of positive emotion is generally a good thing and has been
associated with enhanced coping resources, better health, creativity, and prosocial
behaviors (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Therefore, Burton and King
predicted that writing about these peak or intensely positive experiences would
be associated with better physical health in the months following the writing
exercise. Indeed, Burton and King (2004) found that those who wrote about pos-
itive experiences, compared to those in a control condition who wrote about non-
emotional topics such as a description of their bedroom, visited the doctor fewer
times for illness during the 3 months after writing.
Positive psychology focuses on how positive experiences affect one’s per-
sonality and one’s life. Moreover, an important quality of self-actualizing people
is their capacity to have “peak experiences”—feeling unified with the universe and
more humble and powerful at the same time. Maslow also mentioned awe as part
of the peak experience. In the last 10 to 15 years, research on the nature and
experience of the positive emotion of awe has begun to garner serious scientific
attention (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Shiota, Keltner, & Mossman, 2007). Awe is
defined as experiencing the feelings of vastness and expansiveness while at the
same time needing to alter or accommodate one’s perceptions of the world (that
is, it changes how we view ourselves in the world) (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).
In a series of three experimental studies, Rudd and colleagues (2012) examined
how the experience of awe affects people’s sense of how much time they have and
whether they would donate their time as well as their preference of experience over
material things and how satisfied they feel about their lives. They predicted that awe
would increase people’s sense that they have time for things, make them more gen-
erous with their time, increase their preference for experience over material things,
and would boost their sense of satisfaction with life. In three separate experiments,
they randomly assigned half the participants to experience awe. In the first study awe
was induced by showing participants a 60-second video of people experiencing vast
and mentally overwhelming realistic scenes such as waterfalls, whales, and astronauts
in space. In the second study awe was induced by having people reflect upon and
then write when they had “a response to things perceived as vast and overwhelming
and alters the way you understand the world” (Rudd et al., 2012, p. 4). In the third