Development of a Brief State Self-Transcendent Emotion Scale

Self-transcendent emotions (STEs) are often caused by experiences of moral beauty, natural beauty, or artistic beauty. STEs directly predict both individual and collective flourishing and are linked to spirituality. As such, interventions aiming to increase STEs are expected to promote positive outcomes, yet no state measure of self-transcendent emotions exists that could evaluate such interventions. In Study 1, a broad spectrum measure of state STEs–-the State Self-Transcendent Emotion Scale (SSTES; https://osf.io/y3c62/)—was constructed, with three viable subscales: a) a nine-item Social STE subscale consisting of gratitude, love, elevation, and compassion items; a five-item Epistemic STE subscale consisting of awe, wonder, and curiosity items; and a three-item Forgiveness of Others subscale. Study 2 confirmed the goodness-of-fit and established convergent and discriminant concurrent validity, revealing positive correlations with established measures of awe, curiosity, gratitude, elevation and forgiveness; and negative, and no, correlation with measures of anger and narcissism respectively.