Aesthetic flourishing: Scientists’ experiences of beauty, wonder, and awe as indicators of higher wellbeing

Abstract

The majority of existing empirical literature examining both the mental and physical health of academic scientists has focused almost exclusively on the negative outcomes of adverse working conditions and occupational stressors, especially burnout and attrition. Comparatively less attention has been given to potentially protective aspects of wellbeing. This disparity is possibly due to the fact that ‘wellbeing’ itself is less clearly defined. The wellbeing conceptual space has typically been divided into areas of hedonia and eudaimonia, but there have been recent interdisciplinary calls for consideration of higher or ‘self-transcendent’ aspects of wellbeing, which draw on primarily positive psychology and industrial/organizational sociology but also philosophy, theology, and the arts (Belzak et al., 2017; Huta & Ryan, 2010; Thrash, 2021; Varga, 2021). In contrast to hedonic and eudaimonic aspects, self-transcendent wellbeing seems to be related to higher goods (e.g., unity, truth, goodness, and beauty), as well as higher states (e.g., inspiration, insight, and awe), that indicate a form of flourishing beyond simple happiness or even self-actualization (Maslow, 1971; Thrash, 2021; Varga, 2021). In an effort to empirically differentiate these aspects of wellbeing, the present study measured and compared particular constructs—needs satisfaction, meaningfulness, aesthetic experiences—respectively prototypical of hedonic, eudaimonic, and self-transcendent wellbeing in a sample of biologists and physicists. We find that when controlling for both hedonic (basic needs satisfaction) and eudaimonic (vocational identity) wellbeing indicators, frequency of aesthetic experience (indicating self-transcendent wellbeing) still had a significant unique effect positively predicting human flourishing, with an effect size of greater magnitude than that of the eudaimonic predictor. These results suggest an empirically differentiable underexplored higher aspect of wellbeing above and beyond traditional markers of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing.