In recent years, spirituality research has peaked in association with research on transcendent experiences ( Levin and Steele, 2005 Yaden et al., 2017) in relation to wellbeing ( Yaden et al., 2017), health ( Levin and Steele, 2005), and other aspects. Spirituality can be defined as “an individual’s inner experience and/or belief system, that gives meaning to existence, and subsequently allows one to transcend beyond the present context,” in Kamitsis and Francis’s (2013, p. Stokols (1990) maintains that it is a central element of environmental experience. In research on humans’ relationship to the natural world, spirituality is key to understanding people’s emotions and the meaning of nature to them ( Fredrickson and Anderson, 1999). The SEN is an adequate instrument to measure transcendent emotions provoked by direct wilderness exposure or memory thereof. Inspiring energy was defined by feelings of vitality, joy, energy, oneness, freedom, eternity, and harmony with the universe. Awe was defined by feelings of fear, threat, vulnerability, fragility, and respect for nature, which is perceived as vast, powerful, and mysterious. After reliability and validity analysis, the Sublime Emotion toward Nature (SEN) scale included 18 items, distributed into awe (6 items, α = 0.881) and inspiring energy (12 items, α = 0.933). Results show that sublime emotion was defined by two conceptual components: awe, and inspiring energy, both obtained using the computer program FACTOR.

The proposed scale’s reliability and validity is tested in a sample of 280 participants from the general population of Madrid. Taking into consideration the recent research on feelings of awe, an instrument is devised to measure sublime emotion toward nature. The study at hand will generate conceptual and operational definitions of sublime emotion toward nature. Various recent studies have demonstrated nature’s power to induce intense emotions.

The wilderness is one of the most widely recognized sources of transcendent emotion. 2Department of Social Psychology and Methodology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.1Department of Behavioral Science and Technology, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela.

Sublime synonym